Ode to Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian Eunuch

I’d lived half my life before I heard of you,
dear descendant of Noah & Ham,
you who’d been a dry vine, cut
to the quick & so far removed

from your seed you were forced
to inhabit a space beyond
ostensible borders, kept
outside the doors 

of Yahweh’s hallowed house.
A foreigner. A servant.
A harbinger of the new name to come.
I wish I’d known your story sooner. 

Trouble did not find you. You knew right
from wrong & had the guts to march
to the city gate to tell the wicked
King of Judah the facts before the eyes 

of princes who’d cast the prophet
into a cistern where he sank like stone
in the midsummer reservoir of mud.
Where he would starve to death. 

You believed his unpopular
prophecy of famine & plague,
Babylonian captivity. You believed
in his one & only God. I covet

the fearless faith you displayed
when you appeared, compelling
Zedekiah to reverse the tide
of injustice, approve your plan 

to save Jeremiah.
Did the timbre of your voice
echo in Jerusalem’s air
& the sweat on your skin tremble

when you addressed your master?
Did you speak softly, confident
the truth would set the seer free?
Or speak with surety about 

the sinister schemes of fools?
Tell me, please! How did you
engineer liberation
with the gentleness of a lamb, 

thinking of everything but your fate
when you ransacked the wardrobe
at court for rags & clothes
to pad the prophet’s armpits, 

protect his tender flesh by each noble
breast from the rope’s vicious rip
the lengthy twenty feet up?
Just so his words could once again cry 

surrender. I want to know
how you dwelled
in that precarious moment
hostile to your position, 

barred from belonging,
experiencing only the absence
of blessing you couldn’t have known
would be bestowed upon you, 

how you’d be spared from the sword,
how each unforeseen scion
would one day hear from the Lord,
This one was born in Zion.