all day
and into the night
the drip of rain
ticking off the hours
and leaving no memory
Adelaide B. Shaw
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
從白天到夜晚
一小時
接著一小時
滴答作響的雨聲
沒有留下任何記憶
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
从白天到夜晚
一小时
接著一小时
滴答作响的雨声
没有留下任何记忆
Bio Sketch
Adelaide
B. Shaw lives in Milbrook, NY with her husband. She has published short
fiction, children’s poetry and stories, haiku, tanka, haibun and haiga.
She has served as an editor and as a contest judge for Japanese style
poetry. Her haiku blog is: www.adelaide-whitepetals.blogspot.com/ Her haiku collection, An Unknown Road, won a 2009 Merit Book Award sponsored by the Haiku Association of America.
Adelaide’s tanka effectively builds, poetic phrase/line (ku) by poetic phrase/line (ku), to an emotionally powerful ending that has the most weight and reveals the theme of loss. And her poignantly evocative poem reminds me one of my tanka, which I think could be read as a response tanka:
ReplyDelete"memory believes
before knowing remembers ..."
Taipei's plum rain
falling through the ceiling
of my Ajax attic
Cattails, 1, December 2013
Note: In Taipei, the Plum Rain season comes when the plums are ripening, and it rains for three to four weeks.