poetry · swimming

How I Relax

Dive into coolness
Catch, pull, release, recover
Stroke, flutter kick, stroke
Exhale into the water
Turn my head to catch a breath


The W3 prompt for this week is:

The more I read about haikus and tankas, the more I realize that something is lost in translation. A tanka is more than 5-7-5-7-7 syllable counts. It’s actually not syllable counts, it’s kana.

What’s a kana, you ask? I’m not 100% sure because it’s something in Japanese. And Japanese “uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.” (according to Wikipedia) English is phonetic. These two language systems aren’t the same. How can we adapt something like poetry from system to the other. I don’t know.

But I know how I relax. A pool is my happy place and swimming laps helps me unwind.

So here’s my tanka-ish whatever.

14 thoughts on “How I Relax

    1. When people talk about Zen experiences, I picture swimming because I lose myself in the act of swimming and find myself at the same time.

    1. I swim at a fitness facility and the pool was closed for over a week. There were a lot of unhappy people! Swimmers need their swim-fix!

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