The snow is melting off the roof. I can hear it dripping outside the window. I didn’t run this morning. Instead, I took two paracetamol and emptied the dishwasher. I still feel out-of-sorts. And again this question of “normal” arises.
The more I feel things slip out of control, the more I keep rearranging the spice cupboard.
I suppose it is forcing a sense of order on the world. Filling the salt grinder with coarse seas salt. Consolidating three bottles of cumin seeds. It’s grounding.
No pun intended. Or maybe, intended. The textures, the smells are simple and comforting. After nearly a year of ad hoc meals, I’m cooking again. It feels like a good “beginning again”.
Now coffee, and a blank page.
Her voice is pebbled
I press the phone to my ear
an hour of ache
an ocean away she tugs
a thread that unravels us
I can hear you, just-
a knife slices through onion –
keep talking. Neck stretched
to my shoulder stuck mid-shrug
to bear the weight of the call
Ren, I have a long-time friend who has been writing tanka and tanka prose, and haibun, for 20 years and who has been involved in national and international associations of tanka and haiku writers–Marilyn Hazelton.
If you get more interested in pursuing these forms, she has a wealth of books to recommend and websites to look at. She has been editor of red lights, a tanka journal (print), for ten years though she is retiring from that task in June of this year. I have some handouts of sample poems and such if you are interested, or I can put you in touch with her.
I have worked in the form(s) though not intensively. I find them expressive for certain types of poem topics and tones. Keep at it! Enjoyment in the process matters so much.
Thank you, Ann! I will absolutely follow this up. I have been reading a bit today about Tanka Prose or “literary diary” and something about it feels right in a way that haiku doesn’t.
I would love to take you up on the invitation! I’ll get up to speed on her work first…