Working on a word
Do you smile when you hear the word "obedience"?
I’m grateful that my poem “Obedient to the Point of Fruit” has been included in The Orchards Poetry Journal’s Summer 2025 issue.1
Upon encountering certain words, one is immediately disposed to receive it in a negative way. “Obedience” is one of those words that drags along with it ideas of “heaviness,” “oppression,” and “coercion.”
But can it also gracefully carry “order” and “yield”2 and “surrender”?
My poem is on page 63.
Please also see page 99, for “White Oak Falls” by fellow classmate Marie Burdett.
Consider yield: Middle English yelden, "relinquish involuntarily; submit to another's direction or rule; surrender to a foe;" from Old English gieldan (West Saxon), geldan (Anglian) "to pay, pay for; reward, render; worship, serve, sacrifice to" (class III strong verb; past tense geald, past participle golden), from Proto-Germanic *geldan "pay." […] The sense of "produce, bear, bring forth," also "give in return for labor" is from c. 1300, later also in reference to capital invested. (https://www.etymonline.com/word/yield)
I like the last connection to the idea of obedience being an investment in a outcome whose gain is greater than the lesser good we resisted the temptation to pluck.
“We fight with callithump and shivaree”—thank you for this wonderful poem! I needed to read it today.