A Question of Tears

‘From where does the thundercloud come with its black sacks of tears?’- Neruda

Black sacks of tears arrived on my doorstep today;
I thought they’d been delivered by the coalman,
until I opened them, and some teardrops got away,
attaching themselves to leaves and gutters, dripping
on my shoulder, soaking my jacket like a sobbing
child, while a thundercloud clapped with glee
until it dissolved, unloading the rest of its coal-black
sacks, and disappeared. I think it found its way back
to a lake or the murky depths of a simmering sea.

Kim M. Russell, 22nd October 2019

Image result for free images thundercloud
Image found on needpix.com

My response to dVerse Poets Pub Tuesday Poetics: The Question as Poetry

Laura is back to host today’s Poetics, with a focus on the rhetorical question in poetry. She has shared poems by Maya C. Popa, ‘Letter to Noah’s Wife and T.S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’, which inspired her to write a poem of her own, which she also shares.

She reminds us of Björn’s prompt from September 2017, which asked us to write a question poem, drawing on Neruda’s ‘The Book of Questions’(El libro de las preguntas). Laura has picked 6 lines of these at random. Her challenge is to choose ONE of them and write a poem as riposte, retort, rejoinder, being as tangential as we wish. We might seek an answer, or pose more imponderables, or simply pick up the thread and run with the sights and sounds into our imaginations.

I have written a nonet inspired by ‘From where does the thundercloud come with its black sacks of tears?’

39 thoughts on “A Question of Tears”

  2. Ah….I can still see “remnants” of your visit with your grandchild here…..a thundercloud clapping with glee and the jacket soaked as if by a crying child 🙂 I like the way the sack is delivered…opened…and then stolen away by the thundercloud to be delivered to a lake or the sea. Nicely done! And the title is perfect! Nature’s tears….making their way back to the lakes and seas.

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  7. Black tears, soot on the soul, miner’s black lung…yet hope charging through on sunlit steeds. An excellent nonet, and response to the prompt.

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  16. There’s a bit of the old folktale here, a personification which becomes part myth, part morality tale … the storm arrives with a mail-sack of tears, who would dare open it, what does it leave behind, who by God is responsible now for packing all those tears away? A great response to the challenge, Kim.

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  17. Loved this – such consistent imagery – a tight succinct little poem that manages simultaneously to be wide open. The escaping raindrops charmed me making a lovely counterpoint to the tears that followed. In the last line about the simmering sea I got an image of rain over a calm ocean with the drops pocking the surface- exactly like a pot of water when it simmers.

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