"In the Third Year of the Kingship," poetry

Revised Edition: LukivPress (Victoria, BC), 2022. Introduction King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon lays siege to Jerusalem in 618 BCE. He orders "Ashpenaz his chief court official to bring some of the Israelites, including those of royal and noble descent[, to Babylon]. They [are] to be youths without any defect, of good appearance, endowed with wisdom, knowledge, and discernment, and capable of serving in the king's palace." One of those youths, Daniel (likely a teenager), begins an adventure that uncloaks him as an interpreter of the king's fantastic dreams. One of those dreams, of an "immense image" that represents a succession of world powers, reaches right into the last days of the whole world's political machine. Daniel the governmental administrator, the interpreter of dreams, the prophet: He writes prophecy that describes mathematically the year of the Messiah's arrival. He witnesses the fall of Babylon, supplanted (in 539 BCE) by the Medo-Persian empire. Scheming, jealous "high officials and...satraps" trick Darius the Mede, forcing him to send Daniel to the lions pit. But Daniel lives! No lion harms him in any way! Now what? The overjoyed Medo-Persian ruler turns the table: He "g[ives] an order, and the men who ha[ve] accused Daniel [are] brought, and they [are] thrown into the lions' pit, along with their sons and their wives." The lions eat them. Daniel even talks to a high-ranking angel, Gabriel, who speaks for Jehovah: "You are someone very precious." The 12 chapters of this book provide substantial evidence of why the God of the universe loves his servant Daniel, who writes many secrets that will remain sealed, or undecipherable, "until the time of the end" of earth's worldly system. An excerpt Chapter 2 Through time the tunnel,

The stone flies,

A missile that crushes

Towers that reach the sky,

Like Ziggurats,

And vanity,

And greed,

And the imagination of men

Who see themselves

Everywhere, And the lineage of lording

Collapses,

Like all the great places of space

And mind, And so, the towers of great cities,

Of fortified walls,

Crumble into the dust

Or their progenitors. The iron weakened by dissent;

The copper, inferior metal, yet

As far-reaching as Alexander;

The silver, not honoured as

God's hand upon his [?] unclean

City of Baals and other

Unclean masters,

But see, men and women and

Children, re-patriated to uproot

Thorns and 70-year-old rubble;

The gold, Nebuchadnezzar,

Instrument of demise,

The end of David's city, The stone flies through time

The tunnel,

From the throne that won't

Die. The author Dan Lukiv, published in 19 countries, is a poet, novelist, columnist, short story and article writer, and independent education researcher (hermeneutic phenomenology). As a creative writer, he apprenticed with Canada's Professor Robert Harlow (recipient of the George Woodcock Achievement award for an outstanding literary career), the USA's Paul Bagdon (Spur Award finalist for Best Original Paperback), and England's D. M. Thomas (recipient of the Cheltenham Prize for Literature, Orwell Prize [biography], Los Angeles Fiction Prize, and Cholmondeley award for poetry). He attended The University of British Columbia (creative writing department), the acclaimed Humber School for Writers (poetry writing program), and Writer's Digest University (novel writing program).