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

The Question

All day, I replay these words:
Is this the path of love?
I think of them as I rises, as
I wake my children, as I wash dishes,
as I drive too close behind the slow
blue Subaru, Is this the path of love?
Think of them as I stand in line
at the grocery store,
think of them as I sit on the couch
with my daughter. Amazing how
quickly six words become compass,
the new lens through which I see myself
in the world. I notice what the question is not.
Not, Is this right? Not,
Is this wrong? It just longs to know
how the action of existence
links us to the path to love.
And is it this? Is it this? All day
I let myself be led by the question.
All day I let myself not be too certain
of the answer. Is it this? I ask as I
argue with my son. Is it this? I ask
as I wait for the next word to come.

—Rosemary Watohla Trommer
https://www.wordwoman.com

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:

The next Read-Around is 4/23/25 at 5:00 PM PDT

My Thoughts

I’ve always loved questions more than answers. Answer are endings. They close the books, drop of the search, end the story. They wrap up, codify, and reify. They offer an escape from the clutches of confusion; provide a light in the dark to ease our fear of the unknown. Answers give us ground to stand on and a map to guide us. And sometimes they trap us in certitude and blind us to possibilities. Questions open up, draw us out, give us pause and make us ponder. Questions get under our skin, agitate us, compel us to search for ourselves. A good question, taken to heart, engages a quest that will not settle for easy answers, but urges us on, peeling the layers until we arrive at the core and earn our own answer. or it spins off other questions into a Mandelbrot fractal until we see a pattern that connects to everything else. The Question, by Rosemary Watohla Trommer, asks a deceptively simple closed ended question: Is this the path of love? But it is not asked as a one time shot at the truth, but a perpetual question to guide her, to encourage her, and to keep her on the path with love. Is this the path of love? is a beautiful quesiton, a question that can only be answered, as the Poet Rilke urges, by living it into an answer.

Prompt Ideas

1. Use the question as the prompt and journal or write a poem from that title.

2. Consider a concern or an issue that you are struggling with and boil it down to a question. Take a step further and ask what's the question behind or underneath that first question. Keep asking until you arrive at a core question. Journal or write a poem based on that experience.

3. Take Trommer’s question to heart and ask yourself periodically throughout the day or a week, Is this the path of love? Journal or write a poem about where that takes you and what answers come.

4. Trommer describes how the 6-word question serves as a compass. Journal or write about what serves as a compass for you in your life.

5. Journal or write a poem that pares a question down by contrast with what the question is not asking.

6. Journal or write about the experience, real or imagined, of being led by a question and of letting yourself not be toocertain about the answer.

7. Write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.