Words have Wings

Words.

I love words.  I love the way they feel in my mouth, on my tongue, the weight they carry.  The way they can be sweet, or heavy or sometimes just a gossamer whisper slipping over my lips.

Words can heal, but also hurt.  They have wings.  Once they leave your mouth, they fly away, never to return unspent.

Words have to be used carefully.  They carry a responsibility.  God created by means of a word.  He IS a word.  Words are to be treasured.

As a child my father taught me that cussing or swearing was proof of a poor and inadequate vocabulary, and my sister told me to always choose my words the same way that I would pick flowers for a friend, just the most beautiful.  I have passed these truths on to my children.

This post is all about WORDS.

A single word can be a poem by itself, it is loaded with suggestion and meaning.  It can calm the storm or ignite a fire.  It can instantly conjure up a meaning, tell a story or unleash a song.  My children and I often play this game with my husband.  We would say a word and he will sing us a song with that word in it.

I decided that on Mondays I will share posts about words, poetry or any form of writing with you.  It is for all the word artists out there, or anybody interested in the beauty of words and their meaning.  I will share poetry, little literary titbits, quotes, books to read, etc with you on a weekly basis.  Please feel free to share, comment or contribute in some way.

Let your words have wings......

Today I want to share a bit of information about poetry itself.

"Poetry as an art form predates literacy. Some of the earliest poetry is believed to have been orally recited or sung. Following the development writingof, poetry has since developed into increasingly structured forms, though much poetry since the late 20th century has moved away from traditional forms towards the more vaguely defined free verse and prose poem formats.

Poetry was employed as a way of remembering oral history, story (epic poetry), genealogy, and law. Poetry is often closely related to musical traditions, and much of it can be attributed to religious movements. Many of the poems surviving from the ancient world are a form of recorded cultural information about the people of the past, and their poems are prayers or stories about religious subject matter, histories about their politics and wars, and the important organizing myths of their societies.

Poetry as an art form may predate literacy^[1] Thus many ancient works, from the Vedas (1700 - 1200 BC) to the Odyssey (800 - 675 BC), appear to have been composed in poetic form to aid memorization and oral transmission, in prehistoric and ancient societies.^[2] Poetry appears among the earliest records of most literate cultures, with poetic fragments found on early monoliths, runestones and stelae.

The oldest surviving poem is the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor,^[3] writtenin Hieratic and ascribed a date around 4500 B.C.E. Other sources ascribe the earliest written poetry to the Epic of Gilgamesh written in cuneiform; however, it is most likely that The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailorpredates Gilgamesh by half a millennium. The oldest epic poetry besides the Epic of Gilgamesh are the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey andIndianthe Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The longest epic poems ever written were the Mahabharata and the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar."

(The above information is courtesy of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_poetry )

If you would like to share something with us about poetry, feel free to do so.  I would love to hear from you.