Fragments Under Sand

Lyrics

[Intro]
(wind over sand, a brush on a fragment, a magnifier set down)
Papyrology. A rubbish heap in Oxyrhynchus. Half a million scraps.

[Verse 1]
It's a shopping list. Nine times in ten it's a shopping list,
or a tax receipt, or a note from a man to his brother about a donkey.
Not the lost plays. Not the gospels. A donkey and some barley.
And the papyrologist is delighted, which people find strange,
because a shopping list is a WEDNESDAY, and nobody keeps a Wednesday,
and here is one, from a man in Egypt, seventeen hundred years ago.

[Chorus]
Fragments under sand. Torn at both edges.
Half a word at the left and half a word at the right
and the whole middle gone, and the sense of it has to be guessed
by somebody who knows what a sentence in that hand would do.
Fragments under sand. The gaps are most of it.
Somebody studies this. Somebody reads the gaps.

[Verse 2]
There's a letter from a soldier, and the top of it survives,
and he's telling his mother he's alive and the money came through,
and the bottom is missing, which is where he'd have signed his name,
so we have a whole man's relief and no idea who he was.
That is the ordinary condition of the discipline.
You get the feeling and you never get the name.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And the joins — God, the joins. Two scraps in two collections,
one in Oxford and one in Berlin, catalogued eighty years apart,
and somebody notices the tear matches, and the fibres line up,
and a sentence closes that has been open since the third century.
That happens maybe twice a decade. People weep at conferences.
Somebody spent thirty years to be in the room when it did.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(wind, and paper under glass)
He was alive. The money came through.
That's all we get. That's plenty.