The Ethiopian Eunuch
Poem No. 760
A moment of silver in a setting of gold where a man is made bold by a wisdom of old and wades into the river.
This one’s based on two bits of the Bible.
The first is Proverbs 25:11, “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.”
The second is Acts 8:26-40 —the story of St. Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, where a courtier of a foreign kingdom is moved by Isaiah’s old prophecies of Christ, and is baptized on his way back to his far-off home.
The way these two fit together, and the way they fit into today… that is left as an exercise to the reader.