TANKA TAKE HOME —19th February 2025 Adelaide B. Shaw

hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

poet of the month: Adelaide Shaw

Bio:

Adelaide B. Shaw lives in Somers, NY. She has been creating Japanese poetic forms–haiku, haibun, tanka, tanka prose and haiga–for over 50 years and has been published widely. Her work has been featured in Red lights, Presence, and Haiga Online, as well as being in anthologies. Adelaide’s book of haiku, An Unknown Road, available on Amazon, won third place in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Award in 2009.  Her other books,  The Distance I’ve Come,Travel Souvenirs, and Ancient History are available on Cyberwit and Amazon. Adelaide also writes fiction and non-fiction and has been published in several journals. Some of her published Japanese short form poetry are posted on her blog: www.adelaide-whitepetals.blogspot.com

We had the pleasure of asking Adelaide a few questions, and she graciously took the time to answer them.

5. 

TTH: Can you give any advice to someone wanting to write and publish tanka? As an editor what are you looking for in a tanka that makes it most likely to get published? 

Read tanka journals and articles on tanka. Be observant of your surroundings and feelings. Keep a notebook with you and write ideas as they occur. Read your tanka aloud. How does it sound to your ears? Notice where you naturally pause or where you stumble.

hurried holidays

the rush to be ready

the rush to spend;

once there was a time

when prayer slowed us down

          Moonbathing  Winter 2017

A Night Alone

It is a rain pinging, downspout gurgling, wind gusting, pines shushing, leaves swishing night. It is a game after game of solitaire losing night. It is a facing eternity, an aging awareness, a "what's life all about?" night.  It is a tug of war between graceful acceptance and angry depression night. It is a slow ticking of time, of darkness until the first filaments of dawn infiltrate the recesses of my brain with a new day’s promises night. 

twenty-first birthday

able to vote and to drink

to follow all my dreams

            joys and riches wait ahead

            the rainbow's gold within reach  

young and foolish

seeing the distant future

with myopic eyes

knowing now that blurred vision

is a gift that gives us hope

Adelaide Literary Magazine, Sept 2020

Prompt for this week: 

'once there was a time when prayer slowed us down' ... how beautiful. I can almost feel my own heart rate decreasing at the memory of that peace.

The tanka prose is mired in the sort of self doubt that assails us when the weather is dark and depressing, and age seems to be catching up. The second tanka especially seems like a good piece of advice to the young- wait, don't rush into everything, for you don't know what life has to offer. There can be good, and yes, there will be the bad. Adelaide has used myopia in a very interesting way here. It could be the literal myopia, or short-sightedness in the aging eye, or it could be the myopia of the young, who cannot see far enough into the future and thus, want everything now.

Reminiscence is the overarching theme in this lovely tanka as well as the haunting tanka prose. What advice would you give to your 16 year old self?

Give this idea some thought and share your tanka and tanka-prose with us here. Keep your senses open, observe things that happen around you and write. You can post tanka and tanka-prose outside this theme too.

PLEASE NOTE:

1. Post only one poem at a time.

2. Only two tanka and two tanka-prose per poet per prompt.

Tanka art of course if you want to. No tanka sequences, please.

3. Share your best-polished pieces.

4. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written. Let it simmer for a while.

5. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse.

6. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished tanka and tanka-prose (within 300 words) to be considered for inclusion in haikuKATHA monthly magazine.