Poetry Friday: A Spring Tanka

Image 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!

Image via Wikipedia

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Caution: Spring Explosion Impending!

 Just yesterday morning the forsythia branches that I had in a vase on the sideboard looked like this. They were mostly still dormant and covered with tightly closed buds but the first blossom sprang open at the tip of a branch and that lovely lemon yellow made its first appearance.

This morning the bouquet looks like this. There is hardly a closed bud left in the bunch. I know it will be just as dramatic when the same performance happens outside, a bunch of sticks and then suddenly, BOOM, a flash of yellow and we'll be on to the garden season.

I am madly digging and dividing and picture snapping and sketching and thinking to myself that I really need to get a garden journal to write all of it down in. The weather yesterday and today was so lovely, a little fore-taste of what is ahead. I know that rain will come and we'll still have a few chill days before it is really full on but this lovely golden stuff is what we're headed into...and in not very long, I can hold on through the maple blossoms and the re-emergence of the grass and the first crocuses. Really, how much willpower does that take?

I have five little yellow crocuses blooming along one wall of the house and this morning I discovered a whole line of little hyacinth clusters, all down the back of our property line: little gifts from previous residents. I wonder how long ago they were planted and what the gardens looked like then. Nothing  like it does today I expect but I do wish I could see old blueprints for all the derivations of the lives our landscaping has had. You never know what lovely ideas were there that would be excavate-able. Ah for a time machine! Until then, I guess I'll settle for a pen and my trowel.

Related articles

• First crocuses of the year (wcs4.blogspot.com)
• The First Blooms of Spring (jeffreyerb.wordpress.com)
• Think Spring! (sweethomescarolina.com)
• Spring Sprang and then went back to sleep! (mickiesbloominggarden.wordpress.com)
• Flowering Branches (graceandivy.wordpress.com)
• March in the garden: Ephemerals have it made in shade, but not for long (commercialappeal.com)
• How To Force Branches to Flower (apartmenttherapy.com)

Not Thinking and Other Clever Plans

Have been doing a good job, up until now with being quite perfectly patient with this baby. Promised myself I wouldn't get antsy and ridiculously self-indulgent and whiney like I did with Dee but then....I'm slipping just a touch. I still don't feel like I did with him and I am hopeful that I'll return to my thus-far normal state of placid floating onwards. But, really...tonight, I'm teetering on the edge of feeling a little disappointed and slightly sorry for myself.

The last couple of days I have really felt like things were starting to pick up and like labor was actually beginning. Just the very tippy toes beginning, mind you...but, beginning nonetheless. I was feeling lower back achey and kind of pre-menstrual crampy and having slightly painful contractions pretty frequently around the clock (as recently as this morning when I woke up) but yes, now things have calmed right down and the ripples are pretty well gone from the pond. I am big and awkward and just feeling like eating a lot of pizza, not really like I'm about to have a baby. Oh well. At least I don't hurt anymore. So, tomorrow I have another midwife appointment and see the chiropractor for another adjustment and I really do need to think about what I want to do for Mother's Day since I'm not going to be in labor after all. Hmm....nothing very inspired coming to me.

For now, the plan is, Think of Other Things. Lots.

That's about it. Wish I had some other brilliant solution but, that's pretty much all I've got at this point. Honestly, if Baby came right now, he or she would technically be early and as exciting as it would be to hold the new little person in my arms, I really, really want my baby fully-baked and at least in my mind, I'd rather go over than delivery early. That means I sit tight, I drink water, I make lists of productive things to do and I try not to stay awake too late at night stuttering through lists of all the things in the house that need organizing and cleaning. Heh.

So, what else is happening around here? Well, today I spent some good time in the garden, I clipped the black raspberry vines back a bit and tied the new shoots to the fence, I spread grass clipping mulch, I planted two clematis vines and my biggest project: I wove this year's twig arbor over our wicker bench. The grape vines are coming back (both made it through the winter!) which makes me very happy and the clematis will join them, clamoring over the little woven hood. I like this year's rendition quite well and so proud of myself for finishing it before the baby comes. It was a slightly superfluous project that was really bugging me. Just the sort of thing I lie in the dark thinking about at 3AM.

The lettuce in the garden is officially big enough for harvest (now if only I hadn't bought that industrial sized box of washed California salad greens). Blast. Maybe we'll have to eat what we have and snip these leaves when they're palm sized for covering burgers fresh off the grill. Doesn't that sound delicious?

Ru is so cute. Love the rabid story sponge he's become. He's been obsessed lately with Winne-the-Pooh. We were just home today with lots of good flex time so we hauled the big book of Pooh stories around the house and read in the garden, and on his bed and on the couch while I folded laundry and a few million other places. I think I read him five of the stories just today. He's determined to finish the book as soon as possible and cries every time we have to take a break and then retires to a corner with the treasured tome to re-work over E.H. Shepherd's brilliant illustrations and mouth his favorite quotes silently to himself. My family was rabid about Pooh...Milne is still the secret trade language my sisters and I quote back and forth to each other so, it is indescribably good to see my own small boy practically bathing in the same stories at the tender age of four.

And then just a few floral moments from the garden this morning. I tell you people, look at those rose buds! I swear to you, every rose bush I own is budding out fit to be tied at the moment. I'm half worried some ridiculous plague will strike and wipe them all to the ground but IF they all manage to bloom we'll be simply rolling in roses...it will a June to remember. I cannot wait to see my old homestead moss roses bloom that I dug up two years ago with my sister Foxy. They haven't bloomed for me yet but, they're all covered with little  teardrop buds and I just can't wait to dip my nose into the blooms. There is nothing in this world like ancient, nameless roses.