inspired by the
9/11 Memorial Fountain
at the footprint
of each tower that once stood
vast emptiness
( loss and grief ) surrounded
by four walls of water
Note: Below is excerpted from my "Poet and Tanka" essay, titled
The Journey Itself Is Home, which was first published in
Ribbons, 12:2, Spring/Summer 2016:
... Tanka is a short form poetry, and it requires the poet to have acute
observation skills and a set of literary techniques to distill his/her
feeling, thought, or experience to its essence. In his study of Masaoka
Shiki's life and work,
The Winter Sun Shines In, Donald Keene makes a similar point: “A haiku or a tanka without
rhetoric was likely to be no more than a brief observation without poetic tension or illumination" (p. 57)....
Punctuation marks to thematically and emotionally highlight the two contrasting
parts (outer world versus inner thought) of the poem to offer more
dreaming room for the reader’s imagination.
I open windows
(another day no poem
written down,
only blocks of dead words)
and let the spring breeze in
Gusts, 20, Fall/Winter 2014
