The Unnamed Builders: Stones and Silence

Lyrics

Before the first key turned in a lock.
Before the first fire in the hearth, there was the sound.
The sound of you.
They broke the red Georgia clay in the heat of nineteen twenty-two.
No names in the papers, no mention in the society pages.
Just the scrape of the shovel, the weight of the hod.
A language of sweat and dust on Cherokee Road.
Your names are not on the deeds, not carved in any stone you laid.
But I hold you.
I hold your mark in the mortar between the bricks.
I feel your weight in the grain of the floorboards.
Francis Palmer Smith drew the lines, but you gave me breath.
You gave me bones.
The sun beat down on the rising walls.
Scaffolding like a wooden skeleton against the Georgia sky.
The ring of the hammer on the nail head, a thousand times over.
The patient rasp of the handsaw through pine.
The plumb bob finding true.
These are the sounds that made me.
And I hold you.
I hold your mark in the mortar between the bricks.
I feel your weight in the grain of the floorboards.
Francis Palmer Smith drew the lines, but you gave me breath.
You gave me bones.
The archives hold the blueprints, the clean white paper with its perfect ink.
H. Gordon Jones signed the check.
But there is no ledger for the splinters, no receipt for the exhaustion.
No photograph of the faces turned away from the lens, eating lunch in the shade of my unfinished walls.
A century of seasons now.
The families come and go.
They talk of architecture, of revival style, of history.
But I whisper the real story in the settling of the night.
The story of the hands.
I remember.