Questions are supposed to be polite: they ask, then wait. In Dave Bonta's "The big question," the question has a temper instead. "The child's question / was very angry," the poem begins, and within six lines that anger has exposed the speaker, brokered a surprising peace and woken someone up. The question of the title is never actually asked. We get only what it does, which is a sharp decision. Anyone who has been cornered by a child's relentless "why?" knows that the force of the thing matters more than its wording.
The poem is built from three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation, no capital letters and no final full stop, and each couplet works like a separate stage of an event. The first is the provocation, plain and almost flat, a short statement in short lines. The second is the exposure. The line stretches out ("and began to talk openly of my guts"), as if the speaker's defences were spilling over along with it. The third is the reconciliation. With no rhyme to tie the pairs off neatly, nothing feels neatly resolved. The missing punctuation lets the sentences slide into one another, so the poem reads less like a composed statement than like speech caught mid-flow.
The grammar is where the poem gets slippery, and the slipperiness is productive. In "and began to talk openly of my guts," the only possible subject is the question itself. The question becomes a speaker, and a tactless one, announcing the adult's insides to the room. "Guts" does double duty. It means the soft, private interior of the body, and it also means nerve, the courage the speaker may or may not have. Then comes the strangest phrase, "a cunning blubber." As a verb, to blubber is to sob messily. As a noun, blubber is whale fat. Either way it is physical and unglamorous, and it sits beside "guts" as if the poem were laying a body out on a table. The words even sound related: guts, cunning, blubber, all blunt, thick, short vowels that feel chewed rather than sung. "Cunning" suggests that the crying is a strategy, and that whoever is blubbering is shrewd as well as upset. The phrase floats free of any clear grammar, so it could describe the child, the question or the speaker's own embarrassed self-portrait.
That looseness carries into the final couplet. "Who let this complaint and I be friends" attaches most naturally to the nearest noun, the cunning blubber, which becomes a go-between. It is odd to treat a "complaint" as someone you can be friends with, but the poem does exactly that. The thing that attacked the speaker is turned into company. Anger is not defeated or answered. It is made familiar. Then the last line, "wakened by extraordinary weather," refuses to say who was woken. It could be the speaker, the new friends or the child. The weather suggests a storm of feeling, something that arrives unasked and cannot be bargained with. "Extraordinary" lifts it out of the merely stormy and gives it a touch of awe.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it enacts its subject rather than explaining it. A big question, especially from a child, does not arrive in tidy sentences. It breaks into the adult's composure, says embarrassing things aloud and leaves the grammar of the conversation in pieces. Bonta's dangling phrase and uncertain "who" and "wakened" reproduce that disorientation on the page. The poem gives no answer, and nothing in it says who the child is or what was asked. Judging by its ending, the better response to such a question is to let it unsettle you, make friends with the discomfort and accept being woken. The poem is tiny and a little comic, but it suggests that being questioned honestly can feel like weather, and that we may be better for having been caught in it.