It is never easy to be a prophet, especially if you're trying to earn a living. You don't have to look very far to find examples of the sad fate of many prophets, professional or otherwise: Jeremiah, Daniel, and John the Baptist to name a few.
Nobody wants to hear that they are living a life of sin, should part with their money and abandon the pleasures of this world. "What?! You want me to put on a sack cloth and sit in the dirt? Oh, not dirt, but ashes? You've got to be crazy!"
And many believed they were crazy, or after something. A prophet does not attract financial backers that say...a painter might. So I can sympathize with the more modern concept of prophet: the poet. They don't call them starving artists for nothing. Yeats, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, they each struggled to find even an audience for their poetry.
Yet, this is the poetry that still resounds today. These poet-prophets had a farther reaching grasp than the more successful, pop-poets of their day. So here's for the unacknowledged, the unheralded, most likely brilliant prophets among us! For they will live long in the memories of those who have yet to come.
