Thursday, October 17, 2024

To the Lighthouse: Mood Haiku & Tanka

Mood haiku and tanka are the sub-genres of mood poetry, a type of poetry with the focus on moods, which are created by the poet for the readers and to evoke certain feelings in them. Mood is sometimes described as the “emotional landscape” of the poem. It is the feelings that the reader gets from reading the poem as a whole.


Selected Mood Haiku:

tiny sips
to make it last
autumn twilight

Bill Kenney

night chill
rearranging the order
of canned soups

Fay Aoyagi

falling leaves ...
reading the same line
over and over

Brendon Kent 

house clearance
room by room by room
my mother disappears

Alan Summers

living alone
telling one cry of a crow
from another

Elmedin Kadric

the news on mute ...
I'm quiet and quieter
as my old dog sleeps

Chen-ou Liu

                                                                 to be continued ...


Selected Mood Tanka:

at dawn
on a mountain pass
in the drifting fog
almost imperceptible
the smell of green tomatoes

Kenji Miyazawa 

into a pair of stars
we will turn—till then
let us never recall
autumn’s voice
we heard in the same bed

Akiko Yosano 

with each quiver
it is laying an egg
a white moth
why did it enter my mind
this frosty night?

Samio Maekawa

dusk gathers
with the alchemy
of ravens . . .
alone, in a clearing
my heart picked clean

Robin Anna Smith

and when 
the sand runs out? 
the stillness 
of the hourglass 
and I are one

Denis M. Garrison

a drizzly day,
with yellow leaves pasted
to wet black pavement --
returning the library books
she left behind

Larry Kimmel

migrant
detention

sunset

ladders
the sky

LeRoy Gorman

New Delhi draped
in layers of toxic haze
this sense of dread
as October rolls around
chokingly dark... and darker

a girl
sticks her tongue out
at snowflakes
her mother's smiling face
in the shelter window

Chen-ou Liu

                                                                 to be continued ...

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