Word

The word bites like a fish.
Shall I throw it back free
Arrowing to that sea
Where thoughts lash tail and fin?
Or shall I pull it in
To rhyme upon a dish?

from Stephen Spender, Selected Poems

I thought this poem was really excellent when I came across it. It is one of those pieces that reminds me of the core of expression, art, and the way that real expression and art is really a mode of authentic living. It also has pretty obvious parallels across poetry/writing and preaching. What do we do with the word/Word? do we tame it and kill it with forced rhyme and inauthentic structures, both literary and philosophical, or do we recognize a sort of ontological slipperiness to the whole endeavor? There is a freedom in "that sea/ Where thoughts lash tail and fin" that holds us over some existential edge of ignorance and faith. Its the edge where you let people go, let them go live their lives without our input. You watch people you have loved walk away for good or bad reasons, you watch a whole former life fade into the background, you preach the Truth with all you have and then all you can do is pray that truth landed somewhere, took seed with someone. That's not your job. you plant your garden, your fields and sometimes it rains, sometimes not. sometimes there are devastating fires and the good is not from you just as the bad is not from you. By embracing the ignorance, the faith, the edge without hedging your bets and building fences, that fishWord lives in the sea like its supposed to.