Notifications
Clear all
Redthread
7
Posts
4
Users
0
Likes
563
Views
Topic starter
29/06/2017 3:29 pm
At the laundrette
watching my thoughts
tumble over
the many greys
of my life alone.
Hey, that's me!
The grinning boy in the photo
holding at arm's length
the rotting carcass
of a dogfish.
Twenty years ago
she was in my dreams
now she's here again ...
her wide mouth,
her sardonic smile.
Summer moon...
taken from the laundry
I push my face
into her nightdress
for its musky scent.
Such is life...
a pachinko ball
careering wildly
between bells
and lights.
Best wishes, Stuart.
01/07/2017 8:38 am
Sensuous, bitter sweet and melancholic. Lovely
01/07/2017 1:27 pm
Wonderful, suspended always in the gap of 'suchness'. Lovely.
Topic starter
01/07/2017 3:49 pm
Thanks. I'm pleased you like them.
best wishes Stuart.
Topic starter
01/07/2017 3:49 pm
Thanks. I'm pleased you like them.
best wishes Stuart.
02/07/2017 3:01 pm
Dear Stuart, I don't feel competent to comment on tanka. I've never taken any interest in them or seen the point of them, and so never studied them and learned about their structure and strengths. In English we did not have a form like haiku and needed one. But we have an infinite variety of poems from quatrains up and I don't know what extra is offered by tanka. Am I right that in Japanese they specialise in Romance?
Anyway, I think these five liners could make very good haiku if cut down to three lines. But then I am reading them as a haiku reader. If I read them as a tanka reader they would probably make very genre-happy examples of the form.
Topic starter
07/07/2017 7:04 pm
Hi George,
Haiku will always be my first love but tanka can give more space to develop aspects which would be lost if they were truncated into a haiku. Traditionally they were often about romance but the range of contemporary tanka is very much broader.
Best wishes, Stuart.
