Yesterday we were at the Westhill monthly book sale. It is held under the canopy of the shopping centre and there are loadsabooks! The money goes to support a local charity and the variety of books is astonishing, but there are also several genres heavily represented. One of the book sorters, displaying them in supermarket fruit boxes made no concessions to equality and diversity – there were "mens' book" and their were "womens' books". I asked him what defines a man's book – seems that's violence, thriller, military, and other accounts of mayhem. A woman's book is romance, nice story, life story of celebrities and other soft options.
I asked him then why the majority of readers of crime fiction are women, and some of the best crime authors likewise, women – including some of the darker forms of the genre. At which point I realised I was pushing too hard at his useful rule of thumb cataloguing technique by stereotype. I moved on.
Anyway, I bought two books having returned five and a CD for resale. (Net loss to our house of three books!) One of them is a book of poetry where I found this poem which is a brilliant example of biblical exposition that is imaginative, michievous, humorous and serious. There are a number of ways you can treat the story of Samson and Delilah. The weak strong man, the naive Judge who couldn't judge character, his own or Delilah's, the arrogance of strength and power. Then there's the Hollywood treatment of Victor Mature and Angela Lansbury as Delilah!
But this poem is quite different and I'm now wondering if the insight given could ever be preachable by a bald man!
Little Prayer for Samson and Delilah
When all virtue
like Samson's Rastafarian locks
lie strewn about us,
have mercy Lord,
on those who sleep in weakness,
and those who have shorn us of strength.
Like the growing stubble on Samson's head
let us be renewed to undertake
the phenomenal as a matter of course
when we awaken
from the lap of philistine ease.
(Diana Karay Tripp, 20th C, Lione Christian Poetry Collection, Mary Batchelor (ed), p.46.
The painting is by Gerritt Van Honthorst.
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