English Original
this morning
an early phone call
and my life
commits deeper to the play
of black words on white paper
Wind on the Heath, 2020
Naomi Beth Wakan
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
今天早上
清晨一通電話
我的生活
將會更深地投入
白紙黑字的戲劇
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
今天早上
清晨一通电话
我的生活
将会更深地投入
白纸黑字的戏剧
Bio Sketch
Naomi Beth Wakan is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo (2014–16) and the Federation of British Columbia Writer’s Inaugural Honorary Ambassador. She has published over fifty books. Her most recent book of essays, On the Arts, came out in 2020 (Shanti Arts). Her trilogy, The Way of Tanka, The Way of Haiku, and Poetry That Heals was published by Shanti Arts in 2019. Wakan is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, Haiku Canada, and Tanka Canada. She lives on Gabriola Island, British Columbia, Canada, with her husband, the sculptor Elias Wakan.
Naomi's "middle-of-the-story tanka" effectively builds, line and line, to a thematically significant and emotionally powerful ending that reveals the theme of writing as a vocational pursuit (L4): seeing writing as a drama of black words acted out on a stage of white paper in a theater of life.
ReplyDeleteAnd the tanka below included in the same book could be read as a prequel:
my small voice
struggles its way
onto the page
hard to hear it when each moment
trawls with it past memories