A Sonnet to Archivy

 In honor of SC Archives Month, we share this poem by Thomas Michael McCort written in 1982 and cited in Mary Jo Pugh's Providing Reference Services for Archives and Manuscripts, c1992:

As barren fields in wintertime are lined

With broken stalks and ears of corn long spent,

So records are the stubble of mankind --

They have no life, and give no nourishment.

They are the words and numbers of the past,

The dry, misshapen kernels in the bran,

Like chaff stripped from the germ, they cannot last --

Yet you do make them feed the mind of Man.

Then hearty, golden grains these records be:

They are the endless grist of History.