Waiting 7: Huldah

When the king, garments torn 
with grief at the broken law,
sent messengers to me in hopes of hope,
I thought at first, Have you come to me, not
Jeremiah, looking for a mother instead
of a firebrand? It mattered little.
You cannot soothe a fire with lullabies,
can only shout loud and clear 
that the whole town might hear.
For sometimes

the truth is worse than you fear.
"It's true," I told these
envoys to tell the young king,
who was yesterday only a boy seated
on an already broken throne.
"Covenant is as torn as your clothes
and everyone will feel the tear.
You can bury the law deep as the past 
but cannot hide from it forever."

Their hearts were no doubt heavy
as they took comfortless 
words back to a king eager
to turn hearts back all the same.
He would stand
before the whole people and call
back to Sinai, back to the soul's sorry desert,
yet one king more and it would all
be ashes before fallen walls.
Nonetheless his heart burnt.
Nonetheless he called.

And though history, with its way
of splitting truth in half to find it false,
should call me a weasel in the king's
law-making scheme, hear me on this:
I never twisted the truth to fit the crown.
I promised life 
only as far as his heart, rent 
beneath his ripped robes. No more.
No law, discovered or made, 
could make a divided heart one. 
No king could rule his own 
heart, even less the nation's.
Only one,
a child far far far from Josiah,
only the king with no throne
could make these twisted hearts
wholly His own.