Riddle Ian Duhig Who I am’s child’s play,a cry in a kindergarten;though I pun on Latin,my Yorkshire kin’s laik,a whole lexical rainbowunweaving in no code,no masonic Mahabonenor Horseman’s Word –but I’m caltrops at nightto the bare feet of adultsinspiring their languageto such colours as I am,Kulla, Mondrian plasticpixellating Mies blocks;the Ephesian Artemisin each cubist bust;the Song of Amerginby a Turing machine:name me or you’ll bethicker than any brick.The Blind Roadmaker, 43 *"Riddle" begins and ends with the figure mentioned in its third line: the pun. In the first line, "child's play" is an idiom for "very easy", but the literal "play of a child" is also present. The final line varies the idiom "thick as a brick", meaning "very stupid", but also puns on "brick", as the answer to the riddle involves "bricks."            As a student pointed out yesterday, "Riddle" ends by insulting readers who have not figured out its answer: if you can't "name me", you're stupid. This is a common understanding of poems: they are all riddles waiting to be answered. From this perspective, the poem ends with the idea of poems as puzzles rewarding those clever enough to "solve" them and punishing those who are not.            Yet the poem's opening pun offers an alternative way of thinking about poems. If the poem is "child's play", it is easy, and the way to make reading a poem easy is precisely to play with it. A riddle is itself a kind of game, and this poem makes poetry in general a game as well, a game played with words, a game that plays on words, a game of word play, of "cries" and "puns", of "lexical rainbows", of "colourful language", of "songs" (and not, as the second stanza makes clear, a "code" to be deciphered). Ultimately, "Riddle" encourages readers of poetry to let go of the idea of poetry as a set of "riddles" to be solved.