Tag: tanka

poetry · swimming

How I Relax

Sally14 Comments

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.

23 words · poetry

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

Sally4 Comments

She cinched it too tight –
I can hardly breathe, and yet
Composed, I pose here,
While imagining little
Ways to punish that servant

I’m going beyond the 23 words of my Ekphrastic Tanka (5-7-5-7-7) — To be honest, I’m not really sure I did the Tanka right because I know good poetry is more that counting syllables.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (by John Singer Sargent) looks annoyed, doesn’t she? That’s all I see when I look at the painting.

And yet that seems so unfair to Lady Agnew. What if I’m just projecting my own annoyances onto her.

How about this tanka, instead.

I’m going to sneeze
I mean it — I can feel it
Rising, rising up –
So that my eyes smart [breathe in,
Relax, slowly breathe] — ACHOO

Really, it’s a lovely painting. I’m not trying to make fun of Lady Agnew. I want to know what she’s thinking. Is it deeper thoughts than the little annoyances she may be experiencing?