Lord You understand such immense weariness when one only whispers release your servant now deliver me from the scraps of hunger and thirst called life
I don’t need more than the shade of a broom-tree to rest my head a shawl of darkness for eyes call back the angel who hastens with bread and a jar of water send me a long purifying issueless sleep lift my loneliness above its cumber above every bereavement
Lord You know the weariness of your prophets You wake them with a jolt of new hurt to place a new desert beneath their feet to give them a new mouth a new voice and a new name.
Translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon
The prophet Elijah reaches out to catch a piece of bread proffered by a black bird, in this painting of “Elijah and the Crow,” by the Japanese artist Tadao Tanaka.
According to 1 Kings 17, God brought a drought to the land of Israel, apparently as punishment for the idolatrous ways of King Ahab, who, the Bible tells us, had done “more to provoke the anger of the Lord, the God of Israel, than had all the kings of Israel before him” (1 Kings 16:33). God first instructed Elijah to warn King Ahab of the impending drought and then told the prophet how he could escape the suffering: “Go from here and turn eastward and hide yourself by the Wadi Cherith, which is east of the Jordan. You shall drink from the wadi, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there” (1 Kings 17:3–4).
A barren tree and a single rock provide meager comfort to the barefoot prophet, who carries only his walking stick in Tanaka’s painting. The Polish poet Anna Kamienska painted a similar portrait of Elijah—quiet, alone, again waiting in the desert—in her 1985 poem.
The Weariness of the Prophet Elijah
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