OVALEA’S BEDTIME STORY TO THE THIRD CHILD by Kendel Hippolyte
“Child, listen: Earth is language,
a millioning of words that never needed our translation.
I tell you, if that man had listened –
lion roared his name, rain brought messages from passing clouds,
Telling them on to wind in chattling green tongues
all over the garden. Nothing was dumb. All spoke.
They didn’t need his names.
He thought they did.
That’s how it begun.
The rumour going around is that it was Snake.
Not so.
Snake was his brother, why would Snake do that?
Snake tried to make him see
what he was doing. “Naming the earth”! For what?
Earth has named him.
All he had to do was listen.
If he had listened, he could still
have called them, spoken to them, spoken to All.
But with their own names, the names they gave
themselves, talking Earth language.
But not him. He never even heard his own.
Too dam’ busy – naming. Translating, really.
Now he don’t even know his own name. Up to today.
I believe that’s why he talks so much. Trying to find out.
And worse, he lies
When Snake got vex and called him a dam’ fool,
he didn’t like that. Well, who would?
But when the Woman asked
what Snake had called him, he said”
“A dam’ – “
and couldn’t bring himself to say the rest.
That was the first lie”
that his name was Adam.
He never learned his own name,
his true-name – in Earth language.
Yet Earth is nothing else but language.
A millioning of words that keeps on talking to you all the time.
So child, whenever it is you wake up,
listen:
you may hear you name.”
-END
