Commended: Erin Singleton, The Riddle of What Remains

Erin Singleton

Commended, 2026 Tower Poetry Competition, 'A Riddle'

The Riddle of What Remains

I buried a question under the apple tree
and by spring it had learned my name.
That is how riddles behave:
they grow mouths where we thought there were roots.

What walks on four legs in the morning?
I asked the loam. It answered
with beetles, with broken crockery,
with the thumb-bone of a fox.

What speaks without a tongue?
The stream said: grief.
The wind said: everything that has been lost.

In the midden of the years
old words rot into meanings —
mother, country, love —
all giving off their sweet, dangerous heat.

A riddle is not a lock but a wound:
you press it and something opens.
Ask me who I am and I will tell you
in weather, in bone, in dust.

Even the dead keep guessing.
Listen: Edward Thomas in the grass,
Heaney in the sodden field,
both asking what it is to be here.

I ask too, and the earth replies
with a mouthful of stones.
This is the answer:
what is hidden is still alive.