Crack the Bone, Ask the Future

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a bone in fire, ticking — then a sharp CRACK)
Oracle bone studies. Shang dynasty. The oldest Chinese writing we have.

[Verse 1]
The king wants to know if it will rain. The king wants to know
if the harvest holds, if the child is a son, if the war goes well,
and the method is this: take the shoulder blade of an ox,
or the underside of a turtle, drill it, heat it, and WAIT
for the heat to split the bone — and then read the crack.
And then carve what the crack said, beside the crack, in the bone.

[Chorus]
Crack the bone, ask the future. Carve the answer in the bone.
Carve the QUESTION too, and the date, and who did the asking —
and then, months later, come back and carve what actually happened.
They kept score. That's the thing nobody expects. They kept score.
Crack the bone, ask the future. And then check the future's work.
Somebody studies this. Somebody reads the cracks.

[Verse 2]
So what survives is not a scripture. What survives is a LEDGER —
three thousand years of a state's anxieties, itemised:
will it rain, is the queen's toothache serious, should we sacrifice,
did the enemy come, did the hunt take deer, how many, on what day.
The oldest sustained writing in East Asia is an admin record
of a nervous government asking a bone for reassurance.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And they were found by accident, in a pharmacy, in 1899 —
sold as "dragon bones," ground up, taken as medicine for malaria,
which means people were EATING the earliest Chinese writing
for years before a scholar noticed the marks and asked where they came from.
An unknown number of them are simply gone, digested.
Somebody studies what's left. There's a lot left. There was a lot.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(one more crack, and silence)
It says yes.
It says yes, but not this month.