Continuing his comments on prayer, Amulek composed eight simple lines of poetic language that appear in Alma 34:18–25:
Yea cry unto him for mercy, for he is mighty to save.
Cry unto him when ye are in your fields, yea, over all your flocks
Cry unto him in your houses,
Yea, over all your household, both morning, mid-day, and evening.
Yea, cry unto him against the power of your enemies.
Yea, cry unto him against the devil, who is an enemy to all righteousness.
Cry unto him over the crops of your fields, that ye may prosper in them.
Cry over the flocks of your fields, that they may increase.
These lines are not nearly as eloquent as Zenos’s longer poetic masterpiece. But Amulek may have wanted to reach a simpler audience. The poor, although spiritually wiser, may not have been as linguistically sophisticated as the upperclass Zoramites. Here we see eight short lines written in alternating couplets. In Hebrew poetry, you will often have a parallelistic format of some kind, either as antithetical parallelisms or as synthetic parallelisms. Here we have synthetic parallelisms (bringing together the time and place of prayer; or equating flocks and fields, houses and households, or crops and flocks), synonymous parallelisms (equating human enemies with the enemy of all righteousness), and antithetical parallelisms (juxtaposing the Lord’s mercy and salvific might against the devil’s presumptuous preemptive power).
Instead of just seeing these lines as four couplets (four pairs of two lines each), we can see this as two pairs of two couplets (each of which begins with yea, cry, cry, yea; and then yea, yea, cry, cry), which are themselves paired. In effect, we have here eight lines constructed as an overall pair of four pairs, each of a pair of lines, in other words a pair of pairs of pairs. This is an exceptional example of parallelistic writing. The center point of this parallelism is the singular point that we should cry unto the Lord “both morning, mid-day, and evening,” one of the big issues for the Zoramites.
We do not know whether Amulek wrote this poem himself. Whether he did so or was inspired merely to quote it at this juncture, it is very impressive. He may have been imitating Zenos or even quoting from an otherwise unknown text of Zenos, since this poem is similar to Zenos’ poetry quoted in Alma 33 and even adds the admonition to pray in your closets or closed rooms, in your secret places, and even in the wilderness, as did Zenos (as discussed above). Meaningfully, Amulek’s eight lines use the imperative cry the significant number of 7 times.