The Midden

Lyrics

Jutland, 1851.
The air is thick with oysters opened four thousand years ago.
A deep green smell of salt and time and everything you threw away.
We came here looking for a shard, a trace, a way inside the gray.

They call you Midden Heap, the kitchen's patient ghost.
The spine of fish, the broken pot, the bone of the Sunday roast.
Each layer is a Tuesday, a winter, a year.
The quiet strata of the ordinary fear and ordinary day.
You are the archive of what had no name to say.
You hold the ash from scrolls we never learned to read.
You hold the silence of the unremembered creed, the forgotten deed.

But this is not a song for what is lost.
This is the shovel breaking through the winter frost.
This is the hand that brushes off the dirt from every shard.
This is the cure for a memory broken, a life lived hard.
Alethanos, the unforgetting light.
To sing your name is to make the record right.

So I sing this to a milk tooth in the sieve.
The unnamed child, the short, bright life they got to live.
I sing this to the women with the baskets on their heads,
who built you slowly from their lives and from their daily dreads,
and carried you here, to the kingdom of the sheds.
And to the dog, the one small, loyal, faithful friend,
laid down in honor at the midden's quiet end.
You were a relic of a love they couldn't write, a candle in the night.

This is not a story. It is a living tool.
This microphone, a trowel against the rule of the oubliette, the long and final cool.
This is the truth that will not stay away.
The alētheia we un-bury in the light of day.
This breath, a shovel. This note, your name.
I am singing you back into the frame.

Phlogiston. Hypatia. The Lamplighter's tired route.
The Cooper's plane. The Cathar's prayer. The Beothuk's final root.
You are not gone. You are the sacred ground we're on.
The Midden Heap.
Breathing.
Until the final dawn.