Hypatia

Lyrics

There's a space on the shelf next to Theon.
A lacuna shaped like a daughter.
Did you know, you of the astrolabe,
The salt and the reason,
That your name would go to dust on the harbor wind?
That the letters would un-write themselves?

You, in your philosopher's cloak, the tribon.
You, with your hands on a hydrometer,
Testing the density of wine and thought.
You taught the world its orbit,
Traced the cone's ellipse in sand and papyrus.
Did you feel the axis of your own city tilting?
Did you see the new star rising, all fury and faith?

It was March. It was Lent, 415.
The air grew thick with psalms and whispers.
A lector named Peter taught the streets a new word for you:
Witch. Hellenist. Obstacle.
Your chariot wheels on the stone were a provocation.
The sound of a mind moving freely
Through a city that was learning to kneel.

They dragged you from the chariot into the Caesareum.
They met your geometry with oyster shells, with broken tiles.
An argument of scraping bone.
They burned what was left of you at Cinaron,
And the smoke smelled like a library on fire.
They came for your body to get to your books.

And then, the quiet.
The long, slow gathering of dust.
A thousand years of slow erasure, a whisper in a scholar's note.
Just a name without a theorem.
A ghost haunting the margins of other men's histories,
A story told to frighten clever girls.

Hypatia.
I say your name into the library air.
Hypatia.
And the book that was never written opens.
Your voice, a trace on the palimpsest.
Your proof returns.