Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Meg Freer of Ontario with “Why Is the Question Always “Why?”,” a poem that begins as a playful dissection of shopping‑aisle signage and quickly reveals itself as something sharper. What starts in whimsy becomes an inquiry into how a culture obsessed with rules and conformity avoids the deeper questions of meaning, value, and substance. Humor opens the door; truth walks in behind it.
“The free library boxes—always full,/ their content always new. The free/ pantry boxes—empty for weeks./ The urban graffiti reads: Y = Y = / but we never get an answer to “Why?”
Through these images, Meg exposes a society that polices impulse and joy while performing acts of supposed benevolence. The poem points to a willful ignorance of basic need—hunger, loneliness, the quiet ache of the child‑self alive in each of us. It asks what happens when a community replenishes symbolic abundance but allows material care to run dry.
Beneath the humor is a warning: the fire of empathy may be dimming in modern humanity. We are reminded how audacious empathy can be—how it insists on seeing what others refuse to see, how it shows up against the coolness of apathy. Meg urges us to look again, to ask better questions, and to refuse easy answers that never satisfy.
Read “Why Is the Question Always “Why?”” in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Meg Freer was woken up one night in 2015 when what looked like a complete poem flashed in front of her eyes. Since then, her poems have arrived less aggressively, sometimes like musical phrases, and with a strong visual component. Her inspiration often comes from intriguing juxtapositions in the natural world.
Her work has been published in many journals and in four poetry chapbooks. She holds two music degrees and a Graduate Certificate in Creative Writing and lives in Kingston, Ontario. She is co-poetry editor for The Sunlight Press, a contributing editor for Traces Journal, and co-hosts a monthly series featuring poetry performed simultaneously with live improvised music.