In the wake of Michael Hoover’s convalescing, area poets will be posting articles to further the conversation of poetry. This week’s contributor is John Hutchinson John is a retired educator, grandfather of eight, and one who greatly appreciates the outdoors and traveling. He also enjoys writing a poem or two.
Questions, questions, questions! We are full of questions. Questions are the life-blood of human curiosity and are driven by need, want, and sometimes by the workings of imagination.
We may ask simple questions like, “What time is it?” “Where is the bathroom?” “What does a rutabaga look like?” Sometimes our questions require more than a simple answer such as might be the case when we seek a doctor for treatment, “Which doctor might best help me with my condition and why?” Sometimes the questions that weigh most heavily upon us take us into the forest of no answers where we stumble about and ask, “What would have happened if….” or “How will I be remembered?” And, sometimes our questions stretch us and others to see beyond the walls of how we usually think.
Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet in El Libro de las Preguntas or The Book of Questions (Copper Canyon Press, 1974), created his final work in question couplets. His questions have no obvious answers, but simply serve to take the reader outside the usual boundaries of thinking and into the world of imagination and/or examination of self and the condition called human. Here are a few of Neruda’s lovely and/or provoking couplets:
If all rivers are sweet
where does the sea get its salt?Where does the rainbow end,
in your soul or on the horizon?What forced labor
does Hitler do in hell?When I see the sea once more
will the sea have seen or not seen me
- Pablo Neruda
Neruda’s work must have been in the back of my mind the other day as I sat waiting for a poem to come (watched pots and poems never seem to boil). Sitting there in thought, I finally started looking at the scraps of paper on the side of my desk – the scraps with scribbled notes, words that wanted to be more than words, and a few poems-in-progress. It was then this Neruda-like poem of questions came:
Words-in-Waiting
Going through
the scribbled notes,
the faded pieces of paper on the side of the desk,
scraps cloaked in their yellows and whites,
newspapers with writing in the margins,
words, words, words,
discordant hand-maidens to the muse,
words-in-waiting
that never found the hand of marriage,
words that finally gave themselves away
as stand-alone questions at the alter:Did restlessness rustle her skirts
for others to catch a glimpse of need?After man made his bed to lie in it,
how come the bed didn’t have a say in the matter?Why is it so,
harried we hurry to helplessness of habit?What will merchants of death sell,
when there’s no one left to buy?If weeping is a river that carries you to the sea,
is there danger of drowning?Why did she remember the corsage he pinned at her waist,
after she wasted away on love that wasted away?Do cold hands sometimes mean
energy bills are too much to handle?Does the window of loneliness
ever not open to a larger house?Why are new dreams
built upon collapse and compromise?Why was his mouth always on,
like a TV on reruns, not pausing for commercials?Is a man a solitary sailor
on the ship of fools he laboriously built?What do the neighbor’s think
of the one who worries about ‘What’ll the neighbor’s think?’Do clichés wear themselves out
trying too hard for something to say?Does the island of indecision
have any boats without holes in them?And, after the congratulations, the photos, the rice in the air,
the floral’d questions with their faded smiles
simply disappeared.
- John Hutchinson
Questions gave this poem a life it may not otherwise have had. I think it is often in these unanswerable questions we see what is at the core of being human, what lies behind the masks we wear, and what it is we often don’t talk about. Questions such as these are worth honoring, nurturing, and pondering for we never know when they may carry us to a shore we have not explored before, maybe as does this final couplet of Neruda’s:
“Where is the child I was,
still inside me or gone?”
- Pablo Neruda
John has two books of poetry in print: A Taste of the Sun by Publish America (also available at Amazon.com) and Sitting in the Bloom of Us, Conversations with Mother (available at Reader’s Café and via email)