Waxing Rhetorical

Have you ever said goodnight
to a lopsided moon?
Did you watch its waxing light
illuminate the branches of a silver birch?
Did you lower the blind on the mournful flute
of a disembodied owl’s hoot?
Or did you peer into darkness,
hoping for a glimpse of its ghostly silhouette
and to feel the soundless downdraft of its swoop
embedding itself in your consciousness?

Kim M. Russell, 2017

Image result for silhouette of an swooping owl against a lopsided moon and trees
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My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics: the answer is 42 – also linked to Imaginary Garden with Real Toads Tuesday Platform

Bjorn is hosting tonight. He says that anyone who has read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy knows that answers can be much less interesting than the questions. He also says that, in the divisive political world, he thinks the art of posing questions has diminished and all he hears are answers. So when he heard about ‘The Book of Questions’ by Pablo Neruda, he was inspired to give us a prompt to write poems consisting only of questions. We should leave the answer to the reader. We can write a poem consisting of a single question or many. We can fill our questions with meaning or we can make them abstract. They can be closed or open questions, or even love sonnets (‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ — William Shakespeare) And for those of us who comment, we can decide whether to give answers to the questions or just comment on the poetry.

57 thoughts on “Waxing Rhetorical”

  2. This is absolutely stunning, Kim 😀 especially love the closing; “Or did you peer into darkness, hoping for a glimpse of its ghostly silhouette and to feel the soundless downdraft of its swoop embedding itself in your consciousness?” .. Beautifully executed!❤️

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  4. Yup–sterling poetic–rocked the prompt, yet it is a whole, not dangling ideas or stanzas. I agree your last line (owl time) was killer–those flapping huge wings are haunting.

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  6. I loved your poem. We have a resident owl in the woods by our house. My son loves to sit by the fire pit listening for his hoot and hearing the swoop of his wings! He is majestic!

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    1. Thank you, Bev! I regularly listen to owls. They visit our garden because it’s not manicured and has plenty of wildlife – as well as a very tall silver birch, on which they love to perch!

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  9. I like the way the last two questions leave us with two contrasting options, to shut the blind on it, or to stand outside till ‘the soundless downdraft of its swoop
    embeds itself in your consciousness’. Your questions, have me asking questions.

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  18. This noctal monologue is filled — waxing, yes — with a landscape outside our doors, and as such embraces an otherworld of dark sentience. Loved connotation of “flute” with an owl’s “hoot.” Strikes such a chord.

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  19. Thank goodness it’s only “embedding itself in your consciousness”. Got me on the edge of my seat. (Come to think of it, a Chinese poet might have it embedding in your dinner plate.) Beautiful write, Kim.

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