riding hard
with heels against the horse’s flanks
I race alone
across a desert mindscape —
Samarra’s walls in twilight
FYI: The transition in L 4 from a physical horse race to a "desert mindscape" is the emotional anchor of this tanka. It redefines everything the reader just read, transforming an adventure into a battle with loneliness or memory, and L5 invokes the famous literary tale "The Appointment in Samarra" (where a man rides hard to escape Death, only to meet Death at his destination), it infuses the tanka with a powerful sense of inescapable destiny.
The long dash leading into "Samarra’s walls in twilight" acts like a camera panning out. Readers can see the frantic, internal race, and then suddenly, the vast, quiet, ancient walls appear in the fading light. The tanka ends with a haunting image of imminent death.
Some tales can cross cultures, continents, and even centuries to arrive in our own era with their timeless truths pretty much intact. That’s particularly so for the immortal story of “an appointment in Samarra.” It first appeared in the fifth century in the Babylonian Talmud, that ancient repository of Jewish rabbinical wisdom. Then it crossed over into Islamic literature for reiterations in a thirteenth-century Persian version and a fifteenth-century Egyptian text, before popping up on the London stage in Act III of William Somerset Maugham’s 1933 play Sheppy.
In Maugham’s retelling, the tale is rich in irony. Once long ago, he wrote, there was a merchant in Baghdad who sent his servant to shop in the market. But the servant soon returned home in a panic and told his master about a woman in the crowd there who stared at him angrily. “It was Death that jostled me,” the servant announced, pleading with his master for a horse to flee to the town of Samarra. There, said the servant, “Death will not find me.”
“That was not a threatening gesture,” said Death. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
More than anything else, that ancient tale testifies to the eternal human folly of trying to outrun fate.
And my tanka below could be read as a counter poem:
in the moonlit dark
Death and I stare, unmoving
with thoughts miles apart ...
silence stretches between us
and who will blink first
