Sunday, September 22, 2013

One Man's Maple Moon: Phone Bill Tanka by M. Kei

English Original

a phone bill
with a series of
one minute calls ...
is my life really
so easy to summarize?

Sketchbook, 2001

M. Kei


Chinese Translation (Traditional)

電話帳單中
一長串的
一分鐘通話 ...
我的生命真的是
那麼容易來概括?

Chinese Translation (Simplified)

电话帐单中
一长串的
一分钟通话 ...
我的生命真的是
那麽容易来概括?


Bio Sketch

M. Kei is a tall ship sailor and award-winning poet. He is the editor-in-chief of Take Five : Best Contemporary Tanka, and the author of Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack (Recommend Reading by the Chesapeake Bay Project). He is the editor of Atlas Poetica : A Journal of Poetry of Place in Contemporary Tanka and compiler of the Bibliography of English-Language Tanka. He has published over 1500 tanka poems. He also published a gay Asian-themed fantasy novel, Fire Dragon. Twitter: @kujakupoet

3 comments:

  1. The upper verse sets the thematic context while the rhetorical question raised in the lower verse sparks the reader's emotions and reflection.

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  2. I am trying to find more poems of yours and I have commented on some of them on poet hunter, do you have a facebook page?

    I am on that other blog site called wordpress.

    http://seshatwuji.wordpress.com/

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  3. Thanks for your support of my writing. You can read more of my published poems at Poetry in the Moment, http://chenouliu.blogspot.ca/

    Chen-ou

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