Thursday, August 15, 2024

A Room of My Own: Smoky Forest Tanka

No More Fairy Tales, XXXII

silhouetted
against the smoky forest
far away yet near ...
the Premier's mouth opens, closes
opens before cameras


FYI: This tanka could be read as a prequel to the following haiku

No More Fairy Tales, VI

tongues of forest fires 
there's no Plan[et] B, the rest
blah, blah, blah ...



Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, LXXXIX: "smeared sun"

anything new
under Gaza's smeared sun?
smoky rubble
beyond smoky rubble, and yet
again smoky rubble


FYI: Ls 1&2 make a tragically sarcastic allusion to the following Bible verse:

Ecclesiastes 1:9

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.

And this tanka could be read as a sequel to my tanka prose below:

it’s peaceful now

M-16 rifles are blooming, 2000-pound bombs singing, and Merkava tanks sweeping the streets.

Gaza is cleaner than ever, clean of blood-covered children. Yet, somewhere among the rubble the only moving thing is a boy’s eyes that look up to Heaven.

a mural
on the separation wall
of the West Bank:
in midair a girl grasps
a bunch of rainbow balloons



For more poems about the use of sarcasm, see To the Lighthouse: A Rhetorical Device, Sarcasm


AddedAgainst the Drowning Noise of Other Words, XC:

Just to be alive on this fresh morning 

almost, with eyes closed
to this shrapnel-filled world ...
a Gazan newborn

                                   |                          
a settler aims his gun | a child throws his rock
                                   |

Death to Jews
spray-painted over Death to Arabs ...
heat of Sheikh Jarrah's wall 


FYI: Reuters, May 10, 2021: East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah becomes emblem of Palestinian struggle

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