Monthly Archives: March 2026

Riddles – writing prompt

Leave a reply


Most of January I was on Lanzarote. I was unwell, so I spent much of my time reading in the Piano Bar of the hotel. Here is a view from the balcony. In the distance is Fuerteventura.

I also forgot about posting the answers to Vasko Popa’s riddles which I posted in December. The riddles are from his collection The Golden Apple, 2010. It’s a round of stories, songs, spells, proverbs & riddles that Popa himself selected from various anthologies of Serbo-Croatian folk literature. Here are the riddles and their answers, followed by another riddle.


Riddles

  1. In one room both bone and flesh grow.
  2. I stretched a gold thread through the wide world and wound it up into a walnut shell.
  3. I shake a tree here, but the fruit falls half an hour away

Answers


1 Egg
2 Eyesight
3 The sound of a bell

    Photo
Photo credit: stevepb via Pixabay

Riddle


With an iron key
I open a green fortress
And drive out the black cattle

Canada is as far away as bibles are

1 Reply

I was very pleased to see my poem Canada is as far away as bibles are on After. Many thanks to Editor Mark Antony Owen. You can read the poem here.


After publishes ekphrastic poems and my poem was inspired by The Avid Reader, 1949. Rodney Graham (1949 – 2022) was a visual artist, painter, and musician. He made the lightbox in 2011.


‘We see the middle-aged man / carrying a hat, smoking a pipe, / because Graham inhabits him.’


The Avid Reader, 1949 was one of the works on display at Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, the Netherlands in the major exhibition of Graham’s work titled That’s Not Me. An ironic title as Graham appears in all the works – as a builder having a smoke, a lighthouse keeper, historical figure.

Voorlinden is a fabulous museum – more about it some other time.


I was struck by the attention to detail and the scale of the works. The woman is ‘his wife, swing coat, high heels, walks past on the right.’