On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Munira
For this post, we’re going to explore tanka, a different form of ancient Japanese poetry. Tanka actually precedes haiku. It originated in the 7th century and quickly became the preferred form of poetry in the Japanese court. It was often used for courtship purposes – lovers would write tanka back and forth to each other. As a consequence, many of the great tanka writers were women. Tanka often has more of a personal or emotional content than haiku.
Traditionally a tanka has five lines and 31 syllables. The third line represents a shift in the idea or imagery of the poem and transitions into the last two lines. The first three tanka lines are considered to be the origin of the haiku. As with haiku, tanka poets writing in western languages generally ignore the syllable rules since syllables in Japanese are quite different. We are also freer and more experimental with structure and subject matter.
So that’s your lesson for the day. In this post, all the tanka I’m including have been published, most of them in Gusts, the Tanka Canada journal. Several of these tanka were written in the cabin I built myself on my friends’ property in Quebec. I lived in the farmhouse and used the cabin as a retreat place. My friends lived in Vermont and came up to Quebec on the weekends to help me cut wood and garden. The only tanka / photo that isn’t from Quebec is the one by the ocean. That’s from Crescent City, Calif. I was walking on the beach and talking to my son on my cell phone. None of the photos were taken at the same time the tanka were written, but they seem to correspond nicely. As always, it’s a pleasure to share them with you.
I sweep wood chips
from the cabin floor
autumn wind
blows through October
emptiness
Gusts, Fall/Winter, 2020, No. 32
the persistence
of leaves turning
falling
the things
I push away
Gusts – Fall/Winter 2021
raindrops
ringing
on the stove pipe
somewhere
a temple bell
Water Lines, Studio Georgeville, Georgeville QC, ed. Angela Leuck, 2019
trying
to photograph
a falling leaf
sometimes letting go
is all that’s left
Gusts, Spring/Summer, 2016
deep forest
midnight
the mouse and I
salute
the new year
Gusts, Spring/Summer, 2015
waking up
to silence
of snowfall
I rehearse
my day
Gusts, Spring/Summer, 2015
i hold
my cell phone
to the ocean
so he can hear
the waves
Gusts, Fall/Winter 2009
Never Ending Story – Feb. 3, 2016
my aunt, now gone
made this quilt
once flowers
of blue cloth
bloomed in her hands
Gusts, Fall/Winter 2007
Never Ending Story – December 5, 2016
winter wind
enters the house
I can’t protect
my children
from sorrow
Gusts, Spring/Summer 2014
Never Ending Story – March 3, 2017
years
since I walked
this path
searching
for my tracks
Gusts, Spring/Summer 2013
prostratedragon
Thank you.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
Do you mean tanka?
These really are nice.
Wag
waking up
along with
the accompanying
photo of trees
is a perfect pair
Van Buren
A+ to both photos and poems.
MazeDancer
Wonderful words and pictues.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Oh wow. These are beautiful.
kalakal
What a great way to start the day. Thank you
p.a.
Thanks!👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Spanky
A peaceful wake-me-up.
Am I the only one who didn’t remember that QC was the abbreviation for Quebec? Back to geography class for me.
JeanneT
Lovely! Thank you.
delphinium
Wonderful words and photos-thanks for sharing!
cope
Thank you for pictures, words and a lesson in literature. My grandkids have been playing with haiku, I’ll introduce them to tanka.
WaterGirl
So many reactions…
I love the tanka and the images so very much.
I can’t believe you built the cabin yourself.
I LOVE the quilt your aunt made.
Ken
saw life in tanka
thought is that in polynesia
read further
felt the shift in imagery
cool to learn of something new
Steve in the ATL
Wow. Nicely done. Love the one about the cell phone!
Steve in the ATL
@Ken: well played
Ken
@Steve in the ATL: Thank you. I resisted the impulse to end with “Burma Shave”. Until now.
H.E.Wolf
Exquisite. Domo arigato gozaimasu.
zhena gogolia
Beautiful, thank you.
SiubhanDuinne
These are magnificent. I especially love the one about the quilt.
munira
Thank you, everyone. i’m off to Port Angeles now for the weekend. I’ll check back in when I get to the ferry.
Denali
The things I learn on Balloon Juice. Tanka very much. I am dreaming of a cabin in Quebec now.
JanieM
Evocative pictures and poems — meditative and peaceful.
Munira — My daughter and I went to Knowlton in August 2017 for a Louise Penny book launch. As you said in a comment to one of my Maine posts, the landscape is fairly similar to ours in Maine. But the culture is different enough so that we felt that we were having a nice adventure. I had tried to sharpen my rusty high school French, but it really wasn’t necessary — everyone interacting with the public seemed to be fluidly bilingual. I was reminded of that trip because your pics are set in West Brome, and i figured that couldn’t be far from Knowlton and Lac Brome. And lo and behold, Google maps shows as much. Lovely area — we’re hoping to go back someday.
Albatrossity
Beautiful.
Thanks for sharing these!
Torrey
The interplay of pictures and poetry is beautiful! Thank you.
MomSense
These made me tear up. Beautiful.
frosty
A great idea for OTR submission! I loved the falling leaf. What a photography challenge!
stinger
Wonderful, in the true sense of the word. Thank you!
Munira
@JanieM: yes i was really close to knowlton. I did a poetry reading with Louise penny and some other people once. She’s a very nice person.
Munira
Thank you so much everyone. Love the tanka responses. I made it to the ferry on time. Yay me.
SkyBluePink
Wonderfully creative post!
phdesmond
very nice — thanks for sharing.
dp
Thanks, that was so pleasant, and such a great counterpoint to the news.
Yvonne
Very nice.
Mom Says I*m Handsome
These are just lovely. I wish I could pick up the poetry anthologies on my nightstand as readily as I do my phone or tablet — and when I do, I wish some more that I didn’t use a TikTok brain to read through those brief, exquisitely constructed poems like it was a hot-dog-reading contest.
pluky
@Mom Says I*m Handsome: The trick I use to make my monkey brain slow down enough to properly appreciate a poem is to recite it. Focuses attention not only each word, but on the tonality, sonority, and cadence of the text. In particular, I get a sense of the silences, the pregnant pauses, in the lyric.
J R in WV
I had errands in town, seeking a replacement contactor for the well pump, which is not available here in town… grrr. Anyways, that’s why I’m so late to this thread, all of them really.
Wonderful words, well selected and arranged. I too found the quilt/aunt very evocative. We have quilts made by my Great Aunt, who made wedding ring quilts as gifts for all her nieces and nephews, and then did it for all her great nieces and nephews. Then we inherited my parent’s quilts, a cedar chest full.
What a wonderful thing to see on a beautiful summer afternoon! Thanks so much!