Poetry as a Form of Communication

Communication, it has been said, is the most wonderful of all things--it is what makes us be human.

At the same time it is, definitively, the thing of which we are most unaware. We swim in an ocean of communications like fish in water. But, our ocean is the entire universe and it is an ever-expanding thing without limits.

At some point in the history of human experience some person had to have spoken the first word--but, what was it and who said it and, of course, why? Imagine what life must have been like without any words. When we think, we think with words. How could a person remember what happened to them just moments before? They had to invent some tools by which they could remember. Drawings on the wall of some cave; rocks piled on top of each other; a broken branch on a tree; or, maybe, a certain noise made in their throat and repeated from person to person--could that have been how it all started? Some where, some how, some one was the first one to make the sounds that were first used to indicate water, cold, warmth, fire and light. Primitive indeed! What an amazing thing the invention of language--the tool we use to send thoughts from our minds to the minds of other people. How many thousand years did it take for humans to move from a world without form that was void to a world that could be comprehended? In the beginning was the word--and the beginning was the start of time.

We still have impulses, motivations and sensations within our beings that we cannot recognize with definitive words. We're well into a mightily civilized time with great advanced knowledge and technologies. We know about such things as microbiology and much more; but most likely, we've only scratched the surface. We explore the expanses of space with our micro-technology and we scour the depths of the seas. We've been on the moon and we're getting ready to head for Mars. Yet there are urges within that lie undiscovered.

The invention of words, and subsequently, the development of language is the thing with which all that is, is recreated in our minds. We have come so far that we have developed specialized languages--jargons--as tools for thinking about science in its many divisions, religion, philosophy and other fields of study and endeavor--including poetry which is the way we express those deeply felt inner sensitivities.

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