English Original
all our yesterdays
scatter like white feathers
in the salt wind --
still, you come into my dreams
when the seagulls call
Marion Alice Poirier
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
我們所有的昨日
像白色的羽毛般散落
在鹹澀的海風中 --
然而當海鷗鳴叫時
你還是會出現在我的夢裡
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
我们所有的昨日
像白色的羽毛般散落
在咸涩的海风中 --
然而当海鸥鸣叫时
你还是会出现在我的梦里
Bio Sketch
Marion Alice Poirier is a lifetime resident of Boston, MA. She began writing haiku in 2001 and eventually began to teach haiku in workshops on Poetry Circle and Emerging Poets. She also write short poetry and have been published in on-line haiku and short poetry journals like Tinywords, Hedgerow and The Heron's Nest.
This is a strikingly melancholic tanka that balances emotional resonance with vivid sensory detail. The comparison of “all our yesterdays” to “white feathers” in Ls 1&2 is both visually delicate and emotionally suggestive: it conveys fragility, dispersal, and the inevitability of loss. Feathers are light and easily carried away, and the addition of the “salt wind” reinforces this sense of erosion and distance, as though memory itself is being scattered beyond retrieval.
ReplyDeleteThe coastal imagery—especially the salt wind in L3 and the seagulls in L5—serves as an effective sensory anchor. It situates the tanka in a tangible environment, allowing the reader to almost feel the air and hear the cries overhead. This grounding in the physical world heightens the emotional impact of Ls 4&5 where the poem turns inward toward dreams.
The opening word, “still,” of the lower part of the tanka marks a subtle but important shift from the external, windswept scene to the speaker’s internal landscape. Despite the apparent dissolution of the past, the remembered presence persists, returning in dreams. The closing image of the seagulls’ call in L5 ties the two realms together, suggesting that the natural world not only frames memory but also triggers and sustains it.