How many? A nursery rhyme for grown-ups

Lucia Pietroiusti for Lina Lapelytė, We make years out of hours, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2026
Buy the book →
View the project →

How Many? A nursery rhyme for grown-ups
Lucia Pietroiusti for Lina Lapelytė

Four hundred thousand of us, with you and I inside.
Four hundred thousand things to make,
four hundred thousand things to make them with.
Four hundred thousand slips of four hundred thousand tongues.
Four hundred thousand songs.

What is a song? (you ask the moon.)
A song is a leap, a skip, and a jump!
A thickening of air over empty disaster,
a burst of sudden laughter.

There are four hundred thousand songs,
and sometimes silence.

What is silence?
Heavy, pregnant, hopeful, broken silence?
There are at least four hundred thousand kinds of silence.
(A song hides in all of them,
once every four hundred thousand breaths.)

Breathe in: what is a song, again?
A song is a thread,
that threads a weave,
weaves a picture,
paints a story.

And there are four hundred thousand stories.

Four hundred thousand stories,
(made of love and sometimes sorrow,
chimes the moon.)

What is the moon, and what is love?
The moon watches four hundred thousand kilometres above.
Day and night, night and day,
today, tomorrow, and the next day.

And love?
Love can make a home for us,
and so can sorrow.

But listen, listen and wonder!
There are four hundred thousand ways to love,
and four hundred thousand ways to speak of it!
And another four hundred thousand ways to make a home and live in it!

And what is sorrow?
Sorrow is four hundred thousand things forgotten,
another four hundred thousand lost,
four hundred thousand things falling apart,
as we put them back together four hundred thousand times (we must).

So be still, my love:
we'll have four hundred thousand ways to tumble down,
and tumble down we will.
Four hundred thousand blocks,
taking four hundred thousand knocks in unison.

We'll then look up and ask the moon,
is there nothing to be done?
Is it all coming unstuck?
Is there no love, nor home, nor song?

(Brief silence.)
(The tick of a clock.)

But look, look, somewhere over there!
Someone's singing it all back!