A Small Thing Wrapped in a Poem (Mary Shelley)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
They say he wore the color
of the thing that hid him
and hid inside a lung of oak
so old its rings
predated the tax code
by six hundred seasons

He may have been from Yorkshire
He may have been from nowhere
The court records say "robehod" —
a word they used
for any man the forest
swallowed before sentencing

[Chorus]
But the arithmetic survived
the man who may not have —
subtract from the heavy purse
add to the empty hand
the only formula
that never needed proving
because the hungry
already knew the answer

[Verse 2]
His friar was too fat for ambush
His giant lost a fight on a bridge
and loved him for it
His woman may have been invented
centuries later by a playwright
who needed a kiss
in the second act

The sheriff kept meticulous books
but could not account
for where the venison went
or why the poorest villages
suddenly had flour

The king's deer were not the king's deer
The king's deer were the deer
and every arrow said so

[Chorus]
The arithmetic survived
the man who may not have —
subtract from the heavy purse
add to the empty hand
the only equation
older than currency
the one where the remainder
goes to the table
that hasn't eaten since Wednesday

[Bridge]
They bled him at a priory
because even legends
need an ending
and his ending chose a window —
one final arrow
launched from a dying arm
bury me where it lands

The arrow is still falling
The arrow has been falling
for eight hundred years
and every time it lands
someone picks it up
and draws it back again

[Verse 3]
The forest is a neural thicket now
the canopy is server racks and signal noise
the sheriff wears a quarterly earnings call
the deer are data
and the villages still haven't eaten

But somewhere in the architecture
of redistribution
there's a hood pulled low
over a face no one can verify
doing the only math
that matters in a famine

[Final Chorus]
The arithmetic survived
the man who may not have —
subtract from the heavy purse
add to the empty hand
and if the man was never real
then neither was the sheriff
and the argument collapses
into the only thing
that was always real:
the flour
on the table
in the village
that the forest
chose to feed

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