Hear

Once there was; once there wasn’t.
A long, long time ago, in a land not so far away, when the sieve was inside the straw, the donkey was the town crier, and the camel was the barber… when I was older than my father so that I rocked his cradle upon hearing his cry…when the world was upside down and time was a cycle that turned around and around so that the future was older than the past and the past was a pristine as newly sowed fields…
Once there was; once there wasn’t. God’s creatures were as plentiful as grains and talking too much was a sin, for you could tell what you shouldn’t remember and you could remember what you shouldn’t tell.