if they didn’t pop
what would we do in a world
full of soap bubbles
What makes this poem so interesting is the way it poses a very different kind of rhetorical question: one for which the answer is unthinkable. Because what the poet is really asking is, “What would we do in a world without death?”
That’s a question with such a big answer that it might as well be unanswerable. Without death, would anything seem beautiful or precious? Would life be too boring to live?
The poet has handled these implied questions so lightly that we don’t get too bogged down in them. Rather, she leaves us with the image of a world with nothing BUT bubbles—bubbles as far as the eye can see.
Which raises another question: Is it really a bubble if it doesn’t pop? What’s a beginning without an ending? Is any meaning to life without death?
A comical poem with surprising reserves of speculative, philosophical meaning. —Clark Strand