Third Prize: Joshua Lynch, Riddle me

Joshua Lynch

Third Prize, 2026 Tower Poetry Competition, 'A Riddle'

Riddle me

I was born where the question-mark bends
like a sapling in wind—
a place that speaks only in riddles,
the way rivers speak only in glimmer and guesswork.

My mother taught me to hold silence
the way a lantern holds its trembling core.
“Every answer,” she said,
“is just a shadow trying out its shape.”

So riddle me this:
Where does a thought go
before it breaks the surface of the mind?
Is it a bird rehearsing flight
in the dark behind its bones,
or a door rehearsing being a door?

In school they handed us certainties—
neat, stackable, obedient—
but I kept pocketing the leftovers:
the maybe, the nearly, the not-quite-sure.
They clinked like small suns
against my thigh as I walked home.

Riddle me that.

Sometimes at night I try to solve myself.
I hold my breath to see
if I can hear the machinery of wanting—
the gears of fear,
the pulleys of hope.
What begins as a whisper
sometimes ends as a fault line.

And riddle me this:
If I untie every knot in my name,
will I vanish,
or simply become the string I was meant to be?

Morning arrives like an unopened letter.
I lift its seal with cautious fingers,
half-dreading, half-daring
the answer inside.

But it only says:
Riddle me, still.

And so I do—
a question fashioned of breath,
a body leaning into its own mystery,
walking the long, bright corridor
between what is known
and what is waiting
to be.