The Prophets and the Poets

By Jane Tawel, July 19, 2024

*

The prophets and the poets,

don’t make much money.

Living not by their wits,

but desperately by what they hope is their wisdom,

they often are fasting

to lose the weight of the world,

to be thin enough that all becomes transparent.

If only they could share the truth,

with words that lighten and light.

Eating one’s words

starves one of daily bread.

And the vines of divine revelation

produce only vinegar and thirst.

The prophets cry, “We Thirst.”

And the poets mourn,

“Why use bread for war and not peace?”

*

Eventually, the prophets and the poets,

have no alternative,

but to leave the bone-dry banks,

and float downstream.

Unmoored

Unleashed

Unmourned

Adrift.

And there are those days

(and some dark, lonely nights)

when they are desperate to paddle to the shores,

where the solid people stand,

counting profits and not prophecies,

gathering praises and not poems.

Oh, the prophets and the poets have been too long starved.

They have no sensibility

of what others call sense

And at last, as they float,

yearning words fail the poets

and the prophets can only mumble — 

their rage, silenced into grumbling.

*

The crowds have been against them

throwing stones, covering them

in their rubble of words.

They have been censored

by the ennui of the poor

and the materialism of the mercenary

by the loud and the proud,

by the honey-ed and the money-ed,

by the fountain of youth

that all seek who fear old souls.

Silence for the prophets is not golden tongued,

but a still, small whisper.

And the poets are gathered,

at the still point of the turning world,

but yet to join The Dance.

They await their chance.

Leaden-footed verses pull them down

in their clumsy hopes.

*

And the poets and the prophets

raise hushed voices to the Sky.

“Deliver us”, they cry.

But their words float up

as the Streams of consciousness

carry them away.

*

Will the gods some day find

at the end of the World’s Waterways,

a happy band of sufferers,

of seers, and seekers,

and all the least listened to — 

Find them at the End,

playing weightlessly in the waves,

splashing each other with imagery and symbols,

fishing for food for thought?

Will the mighty someday look down from their rocky peaks,

and find that they have climbed too high

and the dive down now would kill them?

Will we who ignored the song-writers,

the soothsayers,

the children and the very old,

will we left behind

find that we stopped up our ears

and we hardened our hearts

as we hardened our flesh?

Will we discover that we heard only noise

and spoke only words of deaf prose?

Will we find that we have dried-up all the waters

that would have carried us along

buoyed up with the words of the poets and the seers?

Will we some day see

that our stony hearts,

and our craggy consciousness,

did not bring our statues to life,

but made our idols into dead gods?

*

Oh, My people!

Will we turn out our pockets and know at last

that the pebbles we kept

and refused to toss in to The Stream,

were only great weights on our souls,

holding us down, down, down, as we rose,

drowning us in our own dry deserts as we drank,

and in our refusal to listen

bursting our ears with the beat of our drums?

*

Oh, we should have listened

to the old,

to the wise,

to the poets

and prophets,

to the cries of the children,

and the messages of the myth-makers.

And now the

poets and prophets float free.

Finally,

their Truth

and The Way of The Words,

have released them

restored them

rebirthed them.

They have been moved

as they never moved others

into The Deep Watery Way.

Now continually composing

in Never-ending New Creation,

They rise.

Dancing waves suspended

in Eternity’s Ocean,

At last…

As One…

As One…..

© Jane Tawel, 2024