Small Boy
I am currently preparing for a conference on stewardship and so perhaps it’s not surprising that I read Norman MacCaig’s poem “Small Boy” through that lens. His musing on the need to practice letting things go…and the difficulty most of us have in doing just that, I find not just intriguing but actually spot on. I sometimes wonder if we are so enmeshed in a consumer culture that we can only think in terms of commodities and possessions. Similarly I worry that we are so caught up in a worldview (and therefore unconsciously a theology) of scarcity rather than abundance that the idea of unclenching our fingers is hard to contemplate and even harder to accomplish.
But there are those moments of grace when, overcome by an experience of abundance – often when another reaches out to share with us – we find ourselves suddenly and delightfully free. That was part of what reading this poem reminded me of, and even created for me.
Small Boy
He picked up a pebble
and threw it into the sea.
And another, and another.
He couldn’t stop.
He wasn’t trying to fill the sea.
He wasn’t trying to empty the beach.
He was just throwing away,
nothing else but.
Like a kitten playing
he was practising for the future
when there’ll be so many things
he’ll want to throw away
if only his fingers will unclench
and let them go.
“Small Boy,” from The Poems of Norman MacCaig
Thanks, Stuart, for sharing this poem!
Post image: Creative Commons Image Throwing Pebbles in the Pool by Sergio Bertolini
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