the moment perfectly. Tape rolled and boom mikes jostled for
position. Deaf Lemon Hopkins smiled.
“I ain’t deaf no more. I’m back from the dead. I’m the happiest
man in the entire world,” Hopkins said. He started to sing. He could
hear himself and so he had no need to warble. The sound that came
out of his mouth was beautiful, if raw:
It was doggone fishy, You know, I never thought I’d see,
At long-last, our long-lost, long-gone secret history,
A ministry to the future, the mystery of what’s to be,
I stuck a jibberfish in my ear and it said these words to me:
Jibber jabber jibber jabber jibber jabber jerry,
That’s something I’d like to translate but I have no dictionary.
So I’ll tell you what I mean in words I think you’ll understand:
The world in which you live in is the handiwork of man.
No goddess, god or devil shaped this grand monstrosity,
Else it would have been built more perfect—can’t you see it,
can’t you see?
There was no fall from grace, no interned apple tree,
There was only space, and the yearning urge to be.
Man is but a hand on an expanding branch of life,
Sowing and hoeing and growing under strife.
His curse is that his hand must dig the dirt under his feet,
And so is never happy, consequently incomplete,
But if he digs it right, his ground, and digs it with the soul,
Of all that came before him, he never will grow old,
And man will live forever and the tree below him too,
Though his fruit is sometimes sour, and his blueberries are blue.
Is that all? I asked my squishy fishy friend,
It answered, No, Deaf Lemon. This is a ballad without end.
The next lines are yours to write, erase, append and fix,
But watch out! Let’s have none of your bloomin’ human tricks!
Write your verses wisely, make sure to choose them well,
Or you and all your branches will mulch the fields of Hell.
And with that, the exhausted Hopkins fainted.
“What a strange day this has become,” said the doctor to one of
his colleagues as the police arrived to break up the crowd that had
H O L Y S H I T !
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