Every Creature From Gnat to Star Sings Its Secret Verse

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The Hour Before the First Crowing

Long after the lamps had gone out, a man lay on his mat and heard nothing at all. No wind at the shutters. No voice in the lane. The village had folded itself into sleep, and the dark pressed down on him like a lid. He turned his face to the wall and told himself the world was only this. Mud and straw. A cold house in a cold field, under stars that hung there and said nothing back.

He was wrong. He did not know it yet.

At Midnight the Trees of the Garden Broke Open

Far off, in a garden no living foot has crossed since the first man was driven from it, the hour turned to exactly midnight. God came to walk among the righteous where they rest, and the moment His nearness touched the leaves, every tree there bent toward Him and sang. The fruit trees lifted their branches and cried, "Then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy before the Lord, for He cometh to judge the earth." The heavy stalks in the field beyond took up the sound, "The valleys are covered over with corn. They shout for joy, they also sing."

The song did not stay in the garden. It ran out along the edge of the world and struck the roofs of sleeping men, and on one low roof it found a cock.

The Cock Crowed Seven Verses Into the Dark

The bird woke, shook itself, and began. Seven times it crowed, and each cry was a verse. First it flung open the gates of heaven with its voice, "Lift up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in." Then it turned on the men below and summoned them to study, "Arise, ye righteous, and occupy yourselves with the Torah, that your reward may be abundant in the world to come."

The man on the mat heard the next cry come straight through the wall and land on him. "How long wilt thou sleep, O sluggard? When wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?" And then, sharper, "Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty. Open thine eyes, and thou shalt be satisfied with bread." He lay very still. The bird crowed its last, "It is time to work for the Lord," and would not stop.

He sat up in the dark. He was listening now, and once a man begins to listen, the silence he trusted is gone.

Every Throat Had Its Verse

The ground beneath the house was singing. "From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs, glory to the Righteous," said the earth, low, in the man's own floor. From past the fields came the sea, thundering its one line, "Above the voices of many waters, the mighty breakers of the sea, the Lord on high is mighty." Overhead the stars he had cursed for their silence turned out to have been singing the whole time. "Thou art the Lord, even Thou alone. Thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, and Thou preservest them all."

Then the animals. Somewhere a lion opened its chest and roared a psalm, "The Lord shall go forth as a mighty man. He shall stir up jealousy like a man of war." A fox, thin and quick along a wall, cried out for justice against every cheat, "Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and giveth his neighbor not his hire." In the river the fishes, the ones men call dumb, said, "The voice of the Lord is upon the waters, the God of glory thundereth." A frog in the reeds answered with the words the man knew from his own prayers, "Blessed be the name of the glory of His kingdom forever and ever." Even a mouse in the wall confessed, "Thou art just in all that is come upon me, for Thou hast dealt truly, but I have done wickedly." And the cat that slept by the hearth lifted its head and sang the plainest verse of all, "Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord."

Only one bird held its tongue. The vulture kept its verse folded away, saving the single line it will one day scream over the whole earth, when it announces that the redeemer has come.

Nothing Was Made Without a Use

The man rose and stood in his doorway, and the thing that had frightened him folded over into something else. He had thought the frog worthless, the gnat a nuisance, the snail a slow smear across a stone. Now he knew each singer carried a gift hidden in its body. The slime the snail leaves behind heals a man's boils. Crush a common housefly and it soothes the burn of a hornet's sting. The gnat, which only ever takes food in and gives nothing back, is the very cure for the bite of a viper, and the viper's own flesh answers eruptions of the skin, and the lizard undoes the poison of the scorpion. Whatever crawls or stings, God had bent it toward some healing.

And every one of them, he saw, was also a teacher. The cat buries its own filth for shame, and no man taught it modesty. The ants keep a whole city and never once rob one another. The rooster on his roof promises his hen a cloak before he takes her, and swears he will bring it when he can. The grasshopper sings until it bursts its own body and dies mid-song, because a duty is a duty whatever it costs. The stork keeps faith with its mate and feeds its young. And the frog he had scorned, when it sees a hungry creature by the water, offers up its own soft body to be eaten, so that the words come true, "If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat."

The sky at the field's edge had gone the color of ash going pale. The cock was still crowing. The man stood in the door of the house he had called a cold and silent place, and found that his own throat was not silent either, and that it had been waiting all his life for a verse of its own.