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 the poem

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

Ask Me

Sometime when the river is ice ask me 
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether 
what I have done is my life. Others 
have come in their slow way into 
my thought, and some have tried to help 
or to hurt - ask me what difference 
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say. 
You and I can turn and look 
at the silent river and wait. We know 
the current is there, hidden; and there 
are comings and goings from miles away 
that hold the stillness exactly before us. 
What the river says, that is what I say.

—William Stafford
https://allpoetry.com/Ask-Me

Stafford once used William Blake’s quote about a “golden string [that} … will lead you in to Heaven's gate” to describe how he composed a poem by finding a detail in life, any detail, and, like a thread, following it gently into a poem.

Next Read Around is November 12, 2026
at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

There are many truths that live inside of us of which we are unaware. Some of these truths are only formed when we begin an inquiry or when we are confronted by someone or something that requires us to examine our own beliefs and ideas about life. And there are some things we cannot easily talk about except under favorable conditions. To me, the most profound thing about Stafford’s poem, Ask Me, is implicit: that there are questions we cannot answer and things we cannot speak of without cracking our heart open. Perhaps we may never put words to them at all. We have to rely on some silent current to convey them or we have to freeze them, skate over the surface, joke about them, or label them as mistakes to show them to others. 

And then there is the anam cara, the soul friend, the one that listens to the hidden and hears the comings and goings that honor the silent river in you. If there is no one in that role for you at this time in your life, be one yourself. Pick someone, find a time and a place, and ask: “What undercurrent is flowing beneath the frozen surface of your life?” Or “What do you love if you don’t have to love anything?” Then be an echo for them. If they turn the question on you, give voice to the river running through you as it says, “This. I love this.”

Prompt Menu

1. Write about what conditions or situations in life permit you to ask deep questions or allow you to find and speak a truth you might not otherwise have access to or be able to share.

2. Write about the “mistakes” you have made. You can use the prompt: The biggest mistake I made in my life is…

3. Stafford’s poem posits the possibility that the deeds or actions you have done may or may not be what composes your life. Take the question as a prompt: Is what you have done your life? In what way is it and in what way is it not? If what you do is not your life, then what is?

4. Track how others come into your thoughts. What brings someone to mind. How do they occupy your thoughts? What do you do with the others that you carry inside of you?

5. Think of people that have helped or have hurt you. Then answer the question: What difference has their strongest love or hate made?

6. Imagine your life as a frozen river. What is frozen and what is still moving in the deep current under the ice? Or Imagine your life is a river and you have come to let it teach you or tell you its secrets. What does it say?

7. Use Stafford's method of finding some detail in life and following it, like a thread, that leads you gently into a poem.

8. Write from whatever else in the poem inspires you or from elsewhere in your life.