English Original
fruitful lemon tree
graces the front yard
I sing
yet another oldie
to my granddaughter
Gusts, 29, Spring/Summer 2019
Sheila Sondik
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
碩果累累的檸檬樹
為前院增光添彩
我詠嘆
另一首歌老歌
給我的孫女
硕果累累的柠檬树
为前院增光添彩
我咏叹
另一首歌老歌
给我的孙女
Bio Sketch
Sheila Sondik is a poet and printmaker in the Pacific Northwest. A long-time lover of haiku (and practitioner of several other Japanese and Chinese art forms), she began writing haiku and tanka in 2010. Her work has been widely published.
Enhanced by this visually and symbolically rich image of fruitful lemon tree (a tree of cleansing, freshness, happiness,love ...), Sheila's heartwarming tanka builds, poetic phrase/line by poetic phrase/line, to a thematically and emotionally powerful ending that reveals the theme of intergenerational intimacy.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Chen-ou Liu, for publishing my tanka and, especially, for your beautiful commentary on it. Thanks to your translations, I can practice calligraphy on my own poetry!
ReplyDeleteBeautiful tanka. I sang and played oldies to my daughter and now she give birth to her first child. I'm ready with really old oldies! Sheila's poem expresses the joy of getting old with a childlike heart.
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