Poetic Musing: Blooms and Smoke Tanka by Beverley George

you gaze at blooms

of black-boughed cherry trees

I am entranced

by the smoke of cooking-fires

drifting up through sturdy pines

George Empty Garden, 2006

Beverley George

Commentary: Smell or olfaction is the other "chemical" sense. Unlike taste, there are hundreds of olfactory receptors, each binding to a particular molecular feature. Odor molecules possess a variety of features and thus excite specific receptors more or less strongly. This combination of excitatory signals from different receptors makes up what we perceive as the molecule's smell...

Beverley George’s poem is highly suggestive of smell without the direct mention of specific scents. But anyone who has sat around an outdoor campfire used for cooking would easily recall the scents this evokes. Similarly the smell of sap and bark from towering pines.

-- excerpted from "To the Lighthouse: Sensing Tanka: Perceiving Life Beyond the Ordinary"  by David Terelinck

And technically speaking, it might be interesting to do a comparison reading of the following tanka:

autumn rain

the coat I haven’t

worn in

over a year

still smells of her

Twenty Years Tanka Splendor, 2009

                                     

Dick Whyte 

Dick Whyte’s tanka speaks of smells from the past, from memory. Yet there are smells of the present-day in this – the autumn rain, and a coat that is likely infused with its own slightly musty smell from not being used. The suggestion of these scents adds a deeper level of meaning to this tanka.