English Original
dreams
stuck to the pavement
like melted ice cream
your words
a gathering of flies
M. Kei
Chinese Translation (Traditional)
夢想
黏在人行道上
像融化的冰淇淋
你的話語
招引一群蒼蠅
Chinese Translation (Simplified)
梦想
黏在人行道上
像融化的冰淇淋
你的话语
招引一群苍蝇
Bio Sketch
M. Kei is a tall ship sailor and award-winning poet who lives on Maryland’s Eastern shore. He is the editor of Atlas Poetica: A Journal of World Tanka. His most recent collection of poetry is January, A Tanka Diary. He is also the author of the award-winning gay Age of Sail adventure novels, Pirates of the Narrow Seas. He can be followed on Twitter @kujakupoet, or visit AtlasPoetica.org.
This tanka works remarkably well. It is striking and visually precise, effectively conveying a profound sense of disillusionment and emotional decay.
ReplyDeleteLs 1&2, “dreams / stuck to the pavement,” immediately transform an abstract idea into something physical, discarded, and difficult to escape. The simile in L 3, “like melted ice cream,” is unexpectedly mundane, preventing the poem from becoming overly abstract or sentimental. At the same time, it introduces associations of heat, transience, mess, and decay.
The indentation of Ls 4&5 creates both a visual and psychological drop. It interrupts the poem’s initial movement and forces the reader to pause before encountering the final, devastating image. The spatial separation also gives “your words” an almost ominous isolation.
The poem’s greatest strength lies in the relationship between L 3 and L 5. “Melted ice cream” is already an image of something once desirable that has lost its form and become sticky and spoiled; “a gathering of flies” intensifies that deterioration, transforming the scene from mere mess into something actively decaying. In this context, “your words” become scavengers feeding on the remains of those dreams. The final metaphor therefore casts the speaker’s disillusionment in especially visceral terms: what was once sweet and desired has become something that attracts decay.