hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury
Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!
poet of the month: Adelaide B. 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.
6.
TTH: Do you show your work in progress to anyone, or is it a solitary art that you keep close to your chest before letting it go for publishing.
AS: I will show some work on workshops and ask for comments, but mostly I am a solitary writer.
Brief Encounter in St. Augustine
Days of walking, sightseeing, attending meetings, eating. Tired and hot, I sit on a stone bench in a square near the old town. Soon I have company. He could be forty. He could be fifty. He’s thin, bearded, brown as a coconut, disheveled. I smile and say “Hello.” He says “Hello.” I see he is in pain . . .the way he got off his bike, the way he massages his limbs, the way he stretches as if that could lessen his pain.
a gentle breeze
cooling my discomfort
refreshing my mind
opening my eyes
to another life
He tells me about being knocked from his bicycle five days earlier by a car which sped away. Nothing broken, but left with pain in every bone. Has no money to buy the meds prescribed. I give him two over-the-counter pain killers. “God Bless, he says and swallows them. He talks about his life. One of eight children in Indiana, lost his job when factory closed, kicked out of his sister’s house because of drinking. Been on the road 13 years, hitching rides, mostly walking. Walked from Daytona to St. Augustine and has a job as a dishwasher. “Nice people,” he says. “Kept me on after missing work when I was in the hospital. But can’t pay me ‘till next week.
the old/young man
with his home in a pack
shares his free shade
and calls me a saint
when I give him a ten
Drifting Sands May 2023
Brotherly Love
Brothers Tim and Tom O’Grady were very close. Living side by side, they were. Took down the stone wall in the back so as the wee kiddies could run about like the frisky colts they were. They planted together and cooked together in the fire pit they shared in the building of. Aye, twas glorious to see them brothers getting on together. But, twas not to last.
Rumors began a flying faster and farther than Grandma Biddy’s spittle when she was a laughing too hard. Stories be told that there be too much of that sharing going on. Some say twas Tim that was a poaching. Some say twas Tom. But the brothers fell out. And the missuses and the kiddies fell out. It was a real donnybrook with a snapping and a growling and they all getting meaner and meaner like mad hungry dogs going for the juggler to get blood till the Gardai came and said they was all a going to goal.
They was told to put the stone back and that they did and built a wall higher than before. And there they lived and died, never speaking and never seeing. But they couldn’t but a help hearing them new babies screaming and a crying on each side of the wall, and we all was a marveling at the whole of it.
tis a life well lived
bestowing, receiving gifts,
sharing
in the joys and the burdens
in the graces and regrets
Contemporary Haibun Online July 2020; Redmoon Press Anthology 16 2021
Prompt for this week:
Life is made up of relationships. Sometimes chance encounters, and sometimes long-term gut-wrenching connections. Adelaide's tanka prose are both interesting reading. The first one is told in first person, while the second one is told from a general, third-person narrative point of view. Notice the almost wistful feeling in the first person versus the gossipy tone in the second. The narrative shifts based on the storyteller ...
Pick one: a chance encounter that left an impression, or a long-term relationship that has had a powerful impact. Pay attention to the voice you're using and let loose :).
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.
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