Begin with a Question: Poems

By Marjorie Maddox

Begin with a Question explores how the life of faith is a continuous voyage, launched anew each bright day of the spirit or dark night of the soul. This is a book of contemplation and motion, a journey—often in stops and starts—toward the Divine, a pilgrimage paved with prayer, praise, pause, penitence, and (of course) questions. Urgent and universal, joyful or joyless, tinged with doubt or rinsed with hope, here are honest queries that probe, lift, and lead to discovery. Begin with a Question keeps us moving, seeking, reaching, lifting us out of ourselves to something beyond. Using a variety of fixed forms and free verse, the poet examines our relationship to the one who asks, “Who do you say that I am?” A book for seekers, doubters, and believers alike, these poems bring us face to face with anguish, anger, awe, and adoration. They give us permission not to demand answers, but to follow the questions that lead to the Alpha and Omega, to the I AM that keeps us spiraling along this twisting path toward God.

Begin with a Question is published under Paraclete Press's Iron Pen imprint. In the book of Job, a suffering man pours out his anguish to his Maker. From the depths of his pain, he reveals a trust in God's goodness that is stronger than his despair, giving humanity some of the most beautiful and poetic verses of all time. Paraclete's Iron Pen imprint is inspired by this spirit of unvarnished honesty and tenacious hope.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraclete Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781640605381

Marjorie Maddox

Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published 13 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); True, False, None of the Above (Illumination Book Award Medalist); Local News from Someplace Else; Perpendicular As I (Sandstone Book Award), and the ekphrastic collaboration with photographer Karen Elias, Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (Shanti Arts Publishing)—the short story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite); four children’s and YA books—including Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises (Finalist Children’s Educational Category 2020 International Book Awards), A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry; and I’m Feeling Blue, Too! (a 2021 NCTE Notable Poetry Book)—Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press, co-editor); Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (assistant editor); and 650 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. The recipient of numerous awards, she gives workshops and readings around the world. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com  

Book preview

Begin with a Question

poetry prompt, How to Write a Poem, Tania Runyan

But why? By dawn, the day already

brims with answers: Yes, you may question

the universe; no, God will not answer;

yes, a double negative could mean maybe

this strange world cowers inside another Yes—

or not. What a knot of not knowing creates our No’s,

affirmation its own negation of belief—"No,

I do believe your unbelief"—the tangles already

tugged and tied into a complicated Yes

that dons its technicolored coat of questions

drenched in sunrise. I am awash with hope. Maybe

that, too, shimmers more in the morning, the answers

lighting the air like leftover fireflies. But answer

me this before I leap too quickly back to my No:

Will the trill of this blue jay calm my Maybe’s

only until noon when the world’s news already—

more often than not—overtakes me with questioning

despair. I walk out into this morning of Yes

and breathe what I need of silence. You are the Yes

I want, the clear but not simple answer

to this moment, now, before this mind you created questions

the brightness of your burning bush, even as I know

too well the power of heat, my heart already

taking off its sandals of Maybe

to bow low this singed soul. It may be

this, too, is another form of Yes,

the step toward or away already

the movement of prayer that answers

that nightfall of what we cannot know,

that forest we cannot see amidst such branching questions.

Who do you say that I am? you question

and leave no/much room for tangled Maybe’s.

My feet and mind shift. Be still and know …

This morning the lilies bloom Yes!

The newspaper’s other answers

merely crackle in the background, already

a No turned question,

already a Maybe

with Yes the answer.

PART ONE

Point A

Someplace, you’re told,