my son heaps
bowl on bowl
with rice,
head down
he devours the world
Sanford Goldstein
Commentary: Within such a short space of 14 words and 15 syllables, Sanford's "portrait tanka" about the speaker's adolescent son effectively builds, line by line with emotional and visual intensity, to a thematically significant ending: through eating bowls of rice (Ls 1-3) with his head down (L4) without uttering any words, the speaker's son devours the world of this hunger for something more desirable, his silent anger, and everything he suppresses or resents. And the concluding phrase, "the world," is layered with multiple meanings, taking on a metaphorical meaning functioning like a Husserlian lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt).
What's left unsaid is at least as potent as what's said. This middle-of-the-story portrait tanka reminds me of the following remark by Erik Erikson, a German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychological development of human beings, and for coining the phrase "identity crisis."
Adolescents need freedom to choose, but not so much freedom that they cannot, in fact, make a choice.
Note: This tanka is paired with the following one included in the first section of This Short Life: Minimalist Tanka :
how short
my son’s
miss you,
at the close of
today’s letter
For more about Sanford Goldstein's minimalist tanka, see A Poet's Roving Thoughts: Review of This Short Life by Jenny Ward Angyal
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