Shell

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a small tapping from inside something)
Oology. The study of eggs. It has a shameful history and a beautiful one.

[Verse 1]
It is engineered to fail. That's the design brief. Strong enough
to hold a bird's whole weight if she stands on it wrong,
and weak enough that a creature with no muscles and no tools
and a body the size of your thumb can break it from inside
using one temporary tooth that it grows for this alone
and loses within days, having used it once, for this.

[Chorus]
Shell. Calcium and protein, laid down in the dark in hours.
Thousands of pores you cannot see so the thing inside can breathe.
Speckled at one end because it rolls, and it must be found,
and camouflaged so precisely to one cliff that it is useless on another.
Shell. It has to hold. And then it has to give.
Somebody studies this. Somebody counted the pores.

[Verse 2]
And the guillemot's is pointed, so on a ledge it rolls in a circle
instead of off the edge, which is not a metaphor, that is engineering,
arrived at by nobody, over a very long time, by the ones that didn't fall.
And the cuckoo's mimics the host's so exactly, per host species,
that there are cuckoo LINEAGES specialising in one victim's pattern,
which is forgery, at the level of the egg, running for millennia.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
The shameful part: the Victorians collected them by the thousand,
blew them, boxed them, labelled them, and emptied whole cliffs doing it,
and the collections that remain are now the only record we have
of what those birds' eggs looked like before the pesticides thinned them.
So the vandalism became the evidence. Both things are true.
The drawers of stolen eggs are why we know what we destroyed.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the tapping again, and then a crack)
There.
It's supposed to do that. It's supposed to break.