"She refused to be bored, chiefly because she wasn't boring." Zelda Fitzgerald

Friday, March 25, 2011

Poetry Friday: A Spring Tanka

Lilac BudsImage by NedraI via Flickr
Happy Poetry Friday! 

I am writing in loose, Americanized tanka today, a new form for me. Tanka is a form, similar to haiku and also brought to us from Asia. Many modern poets use similar standards as with haiku, setting up the template to flow: 5,7,5,7,7 (each number denoting a syllable) similar to the sound portions that break up the Japanese language.

Most of the great historically memorable tanka poets were women. They wrote about a range of topics, often nature (Ah, the Japanese!) but it was also common to write a poems for your lover at the end of the evening together to remember a sweet or poignant moment. Is that cool or what. High romance if you ask me. Kind of fun to play in a new format. I have always loved haiku and thought it would be good to mess around with a new variation. It was a short poem kind of day.

April Morning

The morning is so
Noisy now in April
A wild tumult streams through the
Cracked window, too loud to read
Din of lilac buds breaking.


Nothing like hope, eh?
I am writing this, looking out at the lawn, towards our lilac bush which is promisingly full of buds but not close to blooming anytime too terribly soon. I do hope we get a few mornings like this. My money is all on April....those buds are swelling more and more and one of these mornings there's going to be a real rumpus!
A lilac bush (Syringa vulgaris) showing a pani...Image via Wikipedia

Hop on over to today's Poetry Friday host and check out the other contrbutions!

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