Why?

Why do honeysuckle blooms spill their fragrance in the night?

When morning sun creeps between slats in shutters, why
are dust motes ignited like fireworks?

And later, the lens of day’s diminishing light freezes in the final
blaze of sunset, capturing a heron’s trailing gangly legs.

Why does spring arrive in starts and stops like a dripping tap?
In the monochrome of dawn and dusk, silhouettes drip and drop

like ink drawings sliding off umbrellas as a sudden blustery wind
turns treetops into a roaring sea. Why bluster?

Nature questions every line I write, like a quaint critic of whom
I am quite fond. Why?

Kim M. Russell, 19th February 2026

This Thursday, Grace is hosting Meeting the Bar at the dVerse Poets Pub, and she has shifted the focus from poetry form to craft style and poems built around questions that remain unanswered.

Grace says that using questions as a central technique can engage the reader directly, inviting them into a conversation or to reflect rather than making statements or demanding. Furthermore, questions reveal voice and perspective. Also, paired with other devices, our poems don’t simply become a list of questions, rather they become textural, sensory explorational.

Grace has provided examples of question-driven poetry by Pabloe Neruda, Mary Oliver and Langston Hughes.

Our challenge is to ask not tell by writing poems built entirely (or mostly) from questions. The guidelines are to begin with a question but not answer it, rather let it breathe; continue with more questions that deepen, pivot, or expand on the theme; pair each question with imagery and metaphor, and let the image do some of the work of meaning. We should use at least two other poetic devices: personification, alliteration or assonance, contrast or paradox, repetition for musicality, and end on a question and resist the urge to resolve.

23 thoughts on “Why?”

  1. Huh! Would you look at that. I didn’t know this was the prompt today, and yet I have a poem for it that I published yesterday. I love all the imagery in your poem, Kim, and that nature questions every line you write.

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  3. Beautiful Kim, I love the glorious images of the honeysuckle blooms and dust motes reignited like fireworks. Rich imagery and movement specially the verse of ink drawings sliding off umbrellas. Thanks Kim for an excellent question poem.

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  10. Most excellent Kim! There are a multitude of fascinating questions in nature. The one that perplexes me most — the human species is part of nature, supposedly at the highest level, yet many of us continue to defile it consistently. Why?

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  11. We choose to plant honeysuckle in our gardens and let them escape into hedgerows and yet… “Why do honeysuckle blooms spill their fragrance in the night?” when we may miss out on the bounty. Your poem addresses the complicated relationship we have with nature, for both better and worse, Kim – bravo…

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