A Room of My Own: After 9/11 Tanka

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