English Original
skeleton keys
in a mirror glinting
at a doorway —
the transparency of rain
reconfigures our view
Joanna Ashwell
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
萬能鑰匙
在門口側邊鏡子中
閃閃發光 —
雨水的通透性
重塑我們的視野
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
万能钥匙
在门口侧边镜子中
闪闪发光 —
雨水的通透性
重塑我们的视野
Bio Sketch
Joanna Ashwell a short form poetry writer from the UK. Published widely in many print and online journals. She has been shortlisted for the Touchstone Award, has won awards and has served on the selection team for the Canadian tanka journal GUSTS. Some of her poetry collections are available on Amazon. River Lanterns, won the honorary Cherita award. Moonset Song, Love’s Scriptures and Every Star (Tanka), Book Patronus (haiku & tanka) are also available on Amazon.
This tanka is closer to surrealist or symbolist poetry than to narrative tanka. Rather than telling a story, it creates meaning through the interplay of evocative images and the shifting relationships among them.
ReplyDeleteLs 1-3 establish a scene that is immediately suggestive yet subtly uncanny:
skeleton keys
in a mirror glinting
at a doorway —
These images accumulate a network of thresholds and acts of passage. The skeleton keys evoke access, mystery, memory, and hidden possibilities. The mirror complicates perception through reflection and doubling, suggesting that what is seen may not be direct reality. The doorway introduces a literal threshold between spaces while also functioning as a symbolic point of transition. Together, these objects invite the reader into a liminal world where ordinary distinctions become unstable.
The pivot comes with the final couplet:
the transparency of rain
reconfigures our view
This is the tanka's most striking movement. Rain is conventionally associated with blurred or obscured vision, yet the tanka foregrounds its transparency. The apparent paradox shifts attention away from rain as an obstacle and toward the medium through which perception occurs. Even something transparent alters what we see. The world itself remains unchanged, but our relationship to it does not.
The choice of "reconfigures," is especially effective. Rather than suggesting a fleeting visual distortion, it implies a restructuring of perception itself. The verb belongs almost to the language of cognition rather than meteorology, transforming rain into an agent that reorganizes experience.
The tanka achieves a strong internal coherence through its sequence of threshold images—key, mirror, doorway, and finally rain. Each element mediates between one state and another: locked and unlocked, reflected and direct, inside and outside, seen and perceived. And L5 extends this pattern beyond physical thresholds to an epistemological one, suggesting that reality is shaped not only by what exists but by the conditions through which it is apprehended.
The result is a tanka that resists paraphrase. Its meaning emerges less from symbolic equivalences than from the cumulative resonance of its images, whose interplay invites the reader to experience perception itself as a form of continual transformation.