sunday swaggers question themselves

It's the first Friday of the month and so the members of our critique group once again have a challenge before them:  to write a question poem.  That is all the guidance our friend Margaret Simon has given us!

Now I like a prescribed form as much as the next poet, for its opportunity to stretch my skills within defined boundaries, but as I note in this piece (which I wrote back in 2011 and have just rediscovered!) free verse is my jam.  So Margaret's challenge is a nice one for me, since I may pose my question/s in whatever form the poem itself seems to demand.  To me a poem is not a poem unless it can show off its shapeliness, unless it operates by some detectable pattern or principle that becomes constraining even if it then breaks free by the end.

I wonder if this poem, written for Laura Shovan's February Poetry Project on February 14th, meets that criterion.  I myself posted the photo and the prompt, which was "MELT IT."

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Meanwhile, I have begun a poetry collaboration with a 5th grader, NZ, whom I taught in 2nd grade.  Poetry just oozes out of him wherever he goes, so I suggested a shared Google Doc and we've been poeting back and forth.  Here's our current exchange...

Some Questions

HM What is it like to be an only child?

NZ Don’t know, I never was. I imagine freedom, 

more love than anything in the world. 

HM No, I never was. What is freedom?

NZ Freedom is the wind blowing on my face,

while my dad hugs me on the boardwalk

next to the great big ocean.

HM The loose wind of the world, the tight hold of a hug.

Is freedom made of push and pull?

NZ Something like that. Freedom can be

being set free, or it could be the opposite,

something holding you back.

How do you see the world?

A meaningless piece of rock,

a speck of dust in the ever growing universe?

Or something more?

HM Something more, something more.  

The rock makes meaning as it breaks from the soil,

as it is built and falls from the human wall,

as it crumbles into dust carried by the wind.

NZ That wind, what does it feel like

as it carries the dust into the great big galaxy?

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And finally, I was wondering last night:

We poets, are we not the posers

of answers rather than questions?

You come to us for our philosophies

of blades of grass and breaking glass,

of blaring joy and ominous birds,

and surely our job is to answer, like

oracles dropping flowers on the water

from our coracles woven of words.

We poets are paddlers, leaving you,

leading you to the answers, not

leaking a trail of questions like

bread crumbs along the path only

to be eaten, to take up rain, to sink 

slowly toward the bottom, nibbled

by fishes along the way.  

Is it not so, that we poets are here to

tidily bundle up the salty grains of truth?

©Heidi Mordhorst 2020

InstadraftTM

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Don't forget to visit the rest of the Swaggers to see what "question poem" means to each of them, and thanks to Rebecca for hosting at Sloth Reads this week!

-Catherine at Reading to the Core
-Linda at A Word Edgewise -Margaret at Reflections on the Teche -Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone