Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Walker

Fire is Walker's chosen element because it refuses to be decorative. It scorches, purifies, exposes. In two lines, she turns "Word" into an instrument of moral combustion: language as heat, not ornament; prophecy as a public hazard. The phrase "Word of fire" braids biblical cadence with Black American urgency, echoing Pentecostal speech, abolitionist testimony, and the long tradition of sermons that functioned as both spiritual shelter and political strategy. This isn't inspiration as uplift; it's revelation as indictment.

"Burns today" is the hinge. Walker insists prophecy is not a sepia-toned archive of heroic voices but a present-tense emergency. The heat is current, ongoing, and uncomfortable. Then comes the most radical repositioning: the fire is "On the lips of our prophets". The authority doesn't sit in institutions, libraries, or official pulpits; it lives in embodied speech, in breath and risk. "Our" is doing political work, staking communal ownership over truth-tellers who are often treated as troublemakers until history retroactively calls them visionary.

The final sting, "in an evil age", lands with stark, almost liturgical bluntness. Walker doesn't flatter her era with ambiguity. She names the moral climate so the reader can't hide behind complexity as an alibi. Context matters: Walker wrote out of the 20th century's American contradictions - Jim Crow, racial terror, war, the betrayals that shadowed civil-rights promises. The subtext is clear: if the age is evil, neutrality isn't sophistication; it's complicity. Prophetic speech burns because it has to.