The Unanswered Question: by Devi Laskar

Recently, I read aloud my poem “What Happens Next” to….an audience! The poem was published in the latest issue of The Tule Review, and the poets who appeared in that review were invited to read their work aloud. It was a fun evening, and it was wonderful to hear the poems read by their authors.

I was joking around with my poet friends later about the form of “American Sonnet” which is like a regular sonnet without any rhymes or rhyming couplets or couplets. American Sonnet is barely a sonnet only because it adheres to the idea of maintaining 14 lines. Of course, “What Happens Next” missed being an American Sonnet by just two lines. It’s just a poem, with no discernable “form.”

And it has taken me a while to understand why this poem actually works, aside from the twist of words at the very end. It is a poem that does not actually answer the question posed in its title. It is a poem that leaves its reader to fill in the gaps with his or her imagination.

Here is the poem:

What Happens Next

 “I know sirens are especially bad news when they come for you.” – Terrance Hayes

 

Everybody, and I mean everybody on the interstate

sitting through the aftermath of that forty-car pileup, replete

with helicopters and jaws of life, candy-red fire

engines and highway patrol clad in ash-colored uniforms

and giant holstered guns, heard them. At first, it sounded like bees

swarming just before the mind alerts you that bees hum in groups

when gunning for you, then it switched to a children’s choir,

well, a choir from an all-girls school, girls who were still at a distance.

As it got closer, it seemed like angels but not the kind we think

of at Christmas; and closer still, the temperature skied high,

the ground trembled and even the trees on the other side of the sound

barriers swayed to this music; everyone got out of their cars

and the women looked up and saw feathered bodies looming

as the men all dropped to their knees and screamed. I thought at first

they were the furies but saw their childish faces, beauty

and terror, and knew they were the sirens coming for us all.

This realization has made me remember my poetry classes in graduate school, and how my teachers, especially the late poet Lucille Clifton, were frequently talking about how it is a gift to the reader and almost always preferable to leave a poem or a sentence, or the end of a paragraph or the end of a section, with an image rather than a fully formed and executed thought.

To leave a poem with an image forces the reader to cull the material he or she has just read and form a conclusion and a thought independently. In “What Happens Next” we actually don’t know what happens next, but happily, we can only imagine.

Devi Laskar is a founding member of the Book Writing World. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, an M.A. in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois, is a rabid Tar Heel basketball fan and is working on a couple of novels.