Pollen Archive

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a slide sliding onto a stage, a focus wheel turning)
Palynology. Pollen. Each grain is a species, and they never rot.

[Verse 1]
Take a core of mud from the bottom of a lake, a metre long,
and every centimetre is a decade, and every decade is a rain
of microscopic grains that fell and sank and stayed exactly there,
and each one is shaped like nothing else on earth but its own plant,
so you can read straight down the mud and say, precisely:
oak, oak, oak, birch, birch, grass — and there. There's the farm.

[Chorus]
Pollen archive. Nobody planted it. Nobody kept it.
The whole botanical history of a valley, filed by year,
sitting in the dark at the bottom of a lake, waiting,
for one person with a microscope who knows what elm looks like.
Pollen archive. Twelve thousand years, in order.
Somebody studies this. Somebody counts the grains.

[Verse 2]
And they count them BY HAND. That's the part nobody believes.
Three hundred grains per sample, identified one at a time,
and a career is maybe two million grains, and the counting
is the whole method, and there is no shortcut anybody trusts.
They can find the exact decade a forest was cleared.
They can find a plague, because the fields go back to weeds.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
It works in forensics too. There's pollen on your coat right now
and it says which county you were standing in this morning.
They have convicted people with it. They have found graves with it.
The air is full of tiny dated evidence of everywhere you've been
and none of us can see it, and one of us can read it,
and she is at a microscope right now, counting to three hundred.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the focus wheel, once more)
Two hundred and ninety-eight.
Two hundred and ninety-nine.