the crackle and pop
of my breakfast cereal --
more news
about car bomb blasts
somewhere else in the world
Wisteria, July 2006
Janet Lynn Davis
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
早餐麥片粥
的噼啪, 噼啪聲 --
在世界的其他地方
有更多新聞
關於汽車炸彈爆炸事件
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
早餐麦片粥
的噼啪, 噼啪声 --
在世界的其他地方
有更多新闻
关於汽车炸弹爆炸事件
Bio Sketch
Janet Lynn Davis, from Texas (USA), has written tanka and other poetry off and on for several years. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of online and print venues. Many of her published poems can be found at her blog, twigs&stones.
Janet's Blyian leap is sociopolitically successful while the contrastive aural images are emotionally effective.
ReplyDeleteBelow is an excerpt from my review of "Leaping Poetry: More Than a Leap from One Image to Another," one that I think thematically and emotionally echoes her beautifully-crafted tanka:
Another example comes from one stanza of his famous anti-Vietnam War poem entitled "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings,"
Our own gaiety
Will end up
In Asia, and you will look down in your cup
And see
Black Starfighters.
Our own cities were the ones we wanted to bomb!
The leap suggested here is a huge and politically-charged one from the domestic image of drinking coffee in America to the combating image of Black Starfighters dropping bombs in Asia, from the kitchens of individual Americans to the battlefields of the American fighting troops, and from the homely image of safety to the war-torn image of atrocity. The fighting image of Black Starfighters reflected in the coffee cup directly and psychologically connects the war fought outside the American soil with the mind and heart of the individual reader, hinting at an unavoidable relationship between the gaiety of Americans and their capacity for destructing their own lives and those of other people. This interwoven relationship between the American people and the Vietnamese people is initially implied in the title of the poem.