If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 2/20/25 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

Karen Mayens, In a TED talk on the power of questions, states that the people who ask the most questions, according to research, are five year-old girls. Moreover, those who get asked the most questions are mothers. Consequently, the characters that appeared in my mind when reading Shuntaro Tanikawa’s poem, “River,” were a mother and daughter. Children with their relentless curiosity often ask what we think are silly questions—silly because we’ve learned to value explanations over questions. By the time we graduate from school, we’re full of explanations, which give our feet ground and our world walls. Not knowing can be risky business, Questions for which we don’t have answers invite us to step on uncertain ground in a space without walls. The strangeness and wonder of life is momentarily dazzling and dizzying. If we have the courage to open our rib cage at that moment, the heart will fly out into the world, vulnerable to its delights and dangers. In the tenderness of that exposure, we learn by heart, whether it be something touching, tender, troubling, or traumatic.

River

Mother,
why is the river laughing?
Why, because the sun is tickling the river.

Mother,
why is the river singing?
Because the Skylark praised the river’s voice.

Mother,
why is the river cold?
It remembers being once loved by the snow.

Mother,
how old is the river?
It’s the same age as the forever young
springtime.

Mother,
why does the river never rest?
Well, you see it’s because the mother sea
is waiting for the river to come home.

Shuntaro Tanikawa
https://www.poemist.com/shuntaro-tanikawa/river

Prompt Ideas

  1. Find a silly or striking question (from memory or from an internet search) asked by a child and use it as your prompt.

  2. Journal or write a poem with dialogue between a parent/adult and a child.

  3. Tanikawa’s dialogue personifies the river. Journal or write a poem of your own that personifies something else form nature.

  4. Extend Tanikawa’s poem with additional questions and explanations about the river.

  5. Identify a question to which you truly do not know the answer and write about it.

  6. Journal or write poem about the state of not knowing. Or consider how you respond to questions to which you don’t know the answer (when do dismiss the question? When do you get curious? When does a question compel you to search for an answer)

  7. What have you learned by direct experience of byheartfelt engagement with life? Journal or write a pome about the upside and downsides of such learning.

  8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.