"The Word of fire burns today On the lips of our prophets in an evil age"

Urgency flares from the phrase “Word of fire,” where capitalized Word carries the weight of sacred utterance and fire signals both judgment and renewal. Fire burns away dross, cauterizes wounds, and lights a path through darkness; it also threatens to consume whatever is dry and complacent. Speech is not ornamental here, it is incendiary, volatile, capable of kindling consciences and scorching lies.

“Burns today” rejects nostalgia and postponement. Revelation is not a relic; it arrives in the present tense, searing through the haze of rationalizations that sustain an unjust order. The heat is immediate: the moral emergency is not tomorrow’s crisis but a condition that presses on the body and the tongue.

Placed “on the lips of our prophets,” this flame takes on a communal charge. Prophets are not distant oracles but flesh-and-blood truth-tellers, preachers, poets, organizers, elders, whose mouths become combustible thresholds. “Our” claims them as kin and burden, suggesting accountability between speaker and community. Lips evoke breath and risk: to carry fire there is to accept the possibility of blistering, censure, and exile. Yet the compulsion to speak is irresistible, like Jeremiah’s fire shut up in the bones.

“An evil age” names not only individual vice but systems: racism, exploitation, militarism, the machineries of erasure. In such a time, prophecy is not primarily prediction but moral diagnosis and summons. The Word burns to expose false peace, to cauterize festering wounds with painful truth, to illumine a path toward justice. Its double edge comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.

The lines also claim poetry’s vocation: art as prophecy, language as praxis. Walker aligns the poet with the bearer of flame, insisting that crafted words can quicken history. The cost is real, the task unavoidable. To listen is to risk being singed into wakefulness. To speak is to become kindling for a larger light. Until the age transforms, the fire must remain on the lips, refusing silence, keeping vigil against the dark.