The Voiceprint of the Seer

Huldah. Huldah, the king’s trusted seer,

a mother-figure beyond any doubt.

You spoke with an authoritative sound

and set the pattern that men would follow.

You recognized a sacred source for what

it was and had no fear in giving voice

to its mandate, its insistent voiceprint

on your mind.  When Josiah needed a seer,

you were happy to provide the  king what

he needed.  You knew he would have no doubt,

would recognize the one  that you follow,

would heed  the message of God you sounded.

You had watched him grow, heard the kingly sounds

of the man in the little boy’s voice.

Your life was being shaped to follow

the one who called you out, made you seer

of things others missed. Your vision enlarged, doubt

diminished, so that you knew what

dangers lurked in Israel’s future, what

idolatry would spawn, and the sound

of God’s anger at those who doubted

the power, the violence  in his voice.

Prophetess to the women,  a seer

they would recognize and own, follow

as loyally as the men followed

Jeremiah, his sense of what

was right and just.  And you, female seer,

did you ever question God’s certain sound?

Did you immediately know his voice?

Did you ever feel a slight hint of doubt?

For us, you ease every fear,  every doubt

we have when we hesitate to follow

the muttering within that demands a voice.

We look at you and we wonder at what

we might say, what new message we might sound

to those who wait the insight of a seer.

The  voices of reason are needed  when doubted

certainty reigns, and seers falsely follow

whatever treacherous tenor resounds.

Peacock Prophet

            . . . his head on the long blue reed-like neck

was drawn back as if his attention were fixed

in the distance on something no one else could see.

            --Flannery O’Connor, “The Displaced Person”

Flannery’s peacock stalked into her tale,

his prophet’s eye evaluating the scene.

His strut foretold that he knew the crisis

these mortals would face, the descending doom

on their unwitting heads.  He knew that the death

of the judge had ushered a new order.

He had seen his tribe decrease, reordered

to fit the widow’s distaste for his tail,

its reminder of a world where death

and life sought justice in a colored scene.

His night call sounded in her ear the doom

that lived just beyond the threat of crisis.

The priest sensed the answer to crisis

in the peacock’s display, saw an order

in the green-gold pattern of deferred doom.

He saw the sacramental sense of the tale

unfold through eyes that seemed dim to the scene

of culture-embedded stagnation and death.

But the women characters, bound to die,

calcified minds lost in their own crises,

were unable to change or shift the scene

that beat a rhythm of boundless order,

a set of events that formed its own tail

like some giant chameleon of doom.

Displacement, the common factor that doomed

each character and brought on grizzly deaths

to two, was the human lot in this tale.

Each person was made to face a crisis

in his or her sense of place and order

within that space.  But the peacock had seen

more than they could see.  His vision of the scene

was linked to a golden ideal that doom

could neither understand nor reorder.

Guizac’s work ethic could never match death’s

certain visit nor avert its crisis

for his kin in this parabolic tale.

Even Astor, whose life measured the tale’s

span by the widow’s three husbands, had seen

more changes than he could explain.  The crisis

of mutation beyond his ken, the doom

of displacement was like the knell of death

to his segregated sense of order.

When order was restored, the peacock’s tail

had escaped death.  The priest, still on the scene,

served the plumed mystic of doom and crisis.