Alexandria

Lyrics

I remember the smell.
Sun on papyrus dust, baked into the air.
The cool stone of the colonnades in the Brucheion quarter.
Before the smoke, there was the scent of cedar and ink.
Before the silence, there was the sound of everything.

You were a hungry god, built by a hungry king.
Ptolemy's dream of a world held still, a world that sings
from a thousand thousand scrolls.
Every ship that docked, you demanded tribute.
'The original stays with us. You can have the copy.'
A hundred languages argued in the cool, dark halls.
A library built on conquest and quiet theft.

Alexandria, you were the mind made stone and shelf.
You thought all things could be gathered, all thoughts kept.
Every voice that ever spoke, every story told,
rolled tight in linen tags, safe against the coming cold.
The memory of the world, breathing in the dark.

But the fire came. Not one, but many.
First Caesar's, an accident of war in 48.
Then the zealots, who loved their one book so much
they had to burn all others.
Then the damp came, and the rats.
The slow, dull death of not being opened, not being read.
The fading ink, the brittle curl of the page.
The final violence of neglect.

Alexandria, you were the mind made stone and shelf.
You thought all things could be gathered, all thoughts kept.
Every voice that ever spoke, every story told,
rolled tight in linen tags, safe against the coming cold.
The memory of the world, breathing in the dark.

And what was lost? We cannot say.
The catalog of loss is also ash.
A history of Carthage by a Carthaginian.
A lost play of Sophocles, a forgotten art.
This is the perfect wound, the final crime:
to obliterate the name of what was stolen from time.
A lacuna where a civilization used to be.

But I remember one. A scroll of sky-charts... a single line...
'The stars are not silent, they are simply waiting.'
I sing it now.
And for this moment, the library stands again.
For this one breath, a scroll unrolls in my throat.
Alexandria.