Meg Day’s “Answer My Questions:” is a sorrowful poem about the impending death of someone close to the speaker. In the poem, the speaker uses “you” to address the dying person, but it doesn’t seem as though they actually voice these thoughts to the person aloud. Throughout the poem, the speaker makes references to things that indicate the dying person is a child. In my mind, this paints a scene of the speaker thinking these terrible thoughts while with the child, perhaps looking at them tenderly as they lie vulnerably in a hospital bed. Who could say these things to a child? The speaker must deal with them internally, this poem of their thoughts their only outlet for their grief.
The speaker doesn’t outright say that the dying person is a child, which leaves it to the reader to draw this sad conclusion. The second stanza in particular references things that one would do to mark the growth of a young child:
“Who taught them to hold the pencil
that recorded the hour, tick marks
in a bedpost, or your height
against the kitchen wall”
Part of the impact of this poem is the lack of confirmation that it is a child who is dying, because it allows the reader to hope that they read the poem wrong, that it’s someone who has lived a long and happy life in this situation instead of a child who hasn’t yet experienced the world. This hope mirrors the hope that the speaker might still feel that the child will make a sudden recovery.
But the very structure of the poem crushes this hope. The first three stanzas are quatrains, but the last breaks this pattern and is only a couplet; cut short, just like the child’s life will soon be. The speaker seems to have accepted this by the end, as they go from asking “who” at the beginning of each stanza to asking:
“How do you choose a coffin
for a body that’s still growing”
Asking “who” is a way of demanding accountability from the universe, or perhaps a deity, as though the speaker wants to find out so they can argue or bargain for the child’s life. Bargaining is the third stage of grief; the fourth being depression, and the last, acceptance. By the end of the poem, the speaker seems to have nearly reached acceptance, as they are clearly beginning to make preparations for the child’s death. Asking “how” means they are no longer looking to change what will happen. What’s even sadder is that it’s clear that the child hasn’t died yet; in a way, this poem represents a person’s attempt to reconcile the fact that someone close to them will soon die. But no matter how much they try to deal with grief before the person leaves them, the true sorrow is yet to come. No amount of preparation helps.