Dear —
It's been a while since I last got in touch, thanks to an oversight of preparing an email for you in my Poetry Readers List and forgetting to hit Send a couple of weeks ago. Doh!
You may recall that I love to play with the theme of prophets versus kings. And that I am a fanboy of Elijah. His denouncements of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel (three thousand years ago) led to the untimely deaths of these tyrants. Not just them, but of all the descendants in Ahab's line — "everyone who pisses against a wall", to quote the prophet himself!
Among them was Ahab and Jezebel's oldest son Ahaziah who, when king himself and laid low with a sickness, continued to defy the prophet. Finally, Elijah cursed him at his own bedside and put him out of his misery!
Before that, and very much akin to Elijah, Moses brought plague against Egypt to force the hand of another "stiff-necked" leader, Pharaoh, who ended up perishing in the Red Sea, drowned by his own hubris.
Ahaziah and Pharaoh. Any parallels for today?
And what has any of this got to do with poetry?
Poetry has a prophetic mission, speaking truth to power, that sort of thing. It's the reason I've been building my Verses Versus Empire series for 20 years. You can hear my narration of the latest poem here.
Until the next time I "unclasp a secret book..." (To quote Shakespeare, as I often do.)
Abdiel
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