Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that mocks, ridicules, or expresses CONTEMP, and the word itself is derived from the Greek "sarkasmos:" “sark” meaning “flesh,” and “asmos” meaning “to tear or rip.” So it literally means "ripping flesh” – a pretty bloody image for a type of speech that we use all the time! (Literary Terms: Sarcasm)
And
Sarcasm all around the world is always against right wing and against people in power. That's the definition of political sarcasm.
-- Bassem Youssef, Egyptian-American comedian, television host, and surgeon
Sarcasm helps me overcome the harshness of the reality we live, eases the pain of scars.
-- Mahmoud Darwish, poet of Palestinian resistance (1941-2008)
Here are my tanka prose about the Israel-Hamas War and tanka about writing in a time of war for your reflections:
it’s peaceful now
M-16 rifles are blooming, 2000-pound bombs singing, and Merkava tanks sweeping the streets.
Gaza is cleaner than ever, clean of blood-covered children. Yet, somewhere among the rubble the only moving thing is a boy’s eyes that look up to Heaven.
a mural
on the separation wall
of the West Bank:
in midair a girl grasps
a bunch of rainbow balloons
And
Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, LXXVII: "flares and blasts"
Gaza's sky
grows red with flares and blasts --
with night news on mute
eyes closed and ears covered
a poet pens, skylark's trilling
FYI: Two more examples:
petal after petal
red on red
how many
layers of makeup
to look undead
Tanka Society of America's Special Feature: "Work," April 5, 2023
Lorelyn De la Cruz Arevalo
Commentary: Unexpected yet thematically significant and visually and emotionally sarcastic L5 (part of this rhetorical question in Ls 3-5) sharpens the contrasts (natural vs man-made, intrinsic vs socioculturally constructed/gendered, ...) between "red petals" in Ls 1&2 and "facial makeup" in Ls 3&4.
And the effective use of syntactic parallelism in Ls 1&2 also highlights the contrasts, adding visual and emotional significance to the tanka.
diner's dumpster overfilled ...
a gray-haired man and flies feast
in gathering dusk
A Fly on a Slice of Bread, 2024
Sanja Domenuš
Commentary: The contrast, "diner's dumpster overfilled" vs a "gray-haired/most likely homeless man and flies feast[ing]," between the two parts of the haiku is sharpened by its sarcastic tone.
This fine haiku is a timely and sociopolitically ironic commentary on the following remark:
Eating is earthly but feasting together is divine.
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