Stardust

If you're picking up a pen, imagining a sword
If you think I'd never flown to the heights at which you soared
Picking up a pen, it's like picking up a spade
To plant or sow a seed, or digging your own grave

I'm made from stardust
Like a planetary sun
Same DNA as stardust
Like an elephants trunk
Is a snorkel full of water

Picking up a pen, imagining a sword
If you think I'd never flown to the heights to which you soared
Picking up a pen, it's like picking up a spade
It's a planet so it seems, or digging your own grave

I'm made from stardust
Like a planetary sun
Same DNA as stardust
Like an elephants trunk
Is a snorkel full of water
Is a snorkel full of water

Who'll feed the young 'cause they're starving
In this beautiful world that you marvel in
Who'd feed the young 'cause they're hungry
In this beautiful world in that you live in for free

Same DNA as stardust, carbonated to last
Same DNA as stardust, from a time that has passed
I'm made from stardust
Same DNA as stardust

Lyrics by:
Brown / McCracken / Wills

Available on:
Music Of The Spheres (4.30)

Details:
I think that the first and second verses of Stardust are based on a poem by Seamus Heaney (1939 - ), the Nobel prize winning Irish poet, entitled 'Digging':

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

The author is 'digging' into his past (recounting memories of his father and grandfather digging), something that Ian does especially on the first half of Music Of The Spheres. In the verses in which the poem Digging is used, Ian digs up his past with John (line 2 of first verse). Compare the last stanza....

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

.... to a recurrent line in Stardust...

Picking up a pen, it's like picking up a spade

As if to acknowledge the influence, Ian even mentions the word 'digging', the title of the Heaney poem, in the line following the above:

To plant or sow a seed, or digging your own grave

Here is a synopsis of the book 'Stardust', by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, which explains this aspect of quantum physics:

Life begins with the process of star formation. Except for hydrogen, every single atom of every single element in our bodies has been manufactured inside stars and then scattered across the universe in great stellar explosions known as supernovas, only then to be recycled as part of us. The hydrogen is primordial material, produced in the Big Bang, but everything else has been built up in the burning hearts of stars. We are made of stardust.

The first single, We Are All Made Of Stars, from Moby's 2002 album, 18, is a previous song to investigate this concept.

Incidentally, Stardust is another name used for cocaine.

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