They Built the Stones to Remember the Sun

Lyrics

[Intro]
(wind on a high plain, and a low choral hum)
Archaeoastronomy. What ancient people knew about the sky, read from the ground.

[Verse 1]
They aligned it. That's the finding. Again and again and everywhere,
independently, on every continent, with no contact between them:
somebody worked out where the sun stops and turns back,
and then moved several thousand tonnes of rock to point at it.
Not for beauty. Not for a god exactly. For a CALENDAR —
because if you plant too early, everybody starves.

[Chorus]
They built the stones to remember the sun,
because nobody could write it down and somebody had to know,
so they made a machine out of a hill and a shadow and a gap
that says ONE DAY A YEAR, unmistakably, here, now, plant.
They built the stones to remember the sun. It still works.
Somebody studies this. Somebody stood there at dawn to check.

[Verse 2]
Newgrange fills with light for seventeen minutes at midwinter
through a box built above the door for exactly that purpose,
five thousand years old, still accurate, still doing it this year,
in a chamber that was sealed and forgotten for four millennia
and simply kept working in the dark with nobody watching,
the way a clock in an empty house keeps time.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And the discipline has to be careful, because the sky is big
and a circle of stones has an awful lot of possible alignments,
and if you look hard enough at anything you'll find a solstice in it.
So the good work is statistical and slow and full of caveats
and consists largely of ruling out the romantic explanation —
and what survives that filter is still astonishing.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the wind, and light arriving)
Seventeen minutes.
Five thousand years, for seventeen minutes.