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| Do tulips know how to kiss? |
April's prompt was a fun one: write a poem inspired by "an impossible question." It came to us via Laura Purdie Salas, who was inspired while listening to Georgia Heard talk about using this prompt with kids. I'm not sure how Heard normally uses this exercise, but we kept it simple. During our ZOOM meet-up, we brainstormed impossible questions for five minutes, and then shared the pool of questions with each other. Then we chose one (or two or ten) and were off and writing.
Of course, there was some discussion of what an "impossible" question was. Maybe impossible only meant "hard to find out in a reasonable time frame"....like how many grains of sand in sandbox, or something "highly subjective"....like what is love? In the end, I don't think it matters---the whole point was to get our brains spinning in new ways.
For me, this prompt brought up memories of my dad telling me a riddle, which began like this: Why is a bicycle? Of course, there is no why, but he had an answer ready: Because a vest has no sleeves.
YUP. I didn't get it then, and don't get it now, but still....I LIKE it. I like it in the way I like poems that I don't fully understand. It's absurd, but then so is life, sometimes. So for my poem this month, I celebrate impossible questions, and their impossible answers. (Many thanks to my fellow poets whose pool of questions led me down this road, and to my dad for the riddle.)
