Cleopatra

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a room, a clock, a long pause)
Here is the one that breaks people. It's arithmetic. That's all it is.

[Verse 1]
Cleopatra was born in sixty-nine BCE. Roughly. Give or take.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was finished around twenty-five sixty.
That is two and a half thousand years before she was born.
The Moon landing was nineteen sixty-nine. Two thousand and thirty-eight
years after her. Take the two numbers. Put them side by side.
She is closer to Buzz Aldrin than she is to the men who built the pyramid.

[Chorus]
Closer to the Moon than to the pyramids. Do that again slowly.
The pyramids were ANCIENT when she was alive — ruins, tourist sites,
already two millennia old, already being visited and graffitied,
and she looked at them the way we look at HER.
Cleopatra. Closer to the Moon. It is simply true.
Everything you file as "ancient" is not one thing at all.

[Verse 2]
And it does something to the shape of the past, this fact.
It stops being a flat picture and it opens up and has DEPTH,
and you realise "ancient Egypt" ran for three thousand years,
longer than the gap between Cleopatra and the present day,
with its own antiquity, its own forgotten periods, its own
"nobody remembers how they did that anymore."

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
There were Egyptian archaeologists. There were Egyptian restorers,
digging out the Sphinx from sand that had buried it twice
before Rome existed, wondering who had made it and why,
and writing down their guesses, which were wrong,
about a monument that was, to them, unimaginably old.
That is a stack of pasts, and we are standing on all of them.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the clock, once)
Closer to the Moon.
Sit with it for a second. It's worth the second.