I’m drawn to tanka because of how much feeling the form can hold in such a small space. Five lines. A moment, an image, a shift in emotion. Something glimpsed and gone before you can fully hold it.
These recent tanka circle memory, absence, and the traces people leave behind. Some arrive as echoes. Some as landscapes. Some remain in the body long after the moment itself has passed.
Distant Thunder
A distant thunder
echoes deep inside my mind.
My ears stay blocked.
I can’t hear the cracking sound
vibrating through the ground.
Sylvian Whispers
Sylvian whispers drift
telling secrets never shared.
like a memory lost.
I follow it through the wind,
down a trail of broken paths.
Tideborn Dreams
Beneath tideborn dreams
a new current takes its form,
I reach out my hand,
fingers skimming the surface
of foam from restless waves.
Hollow Mark
A sting of salt remains
burning softly on my skin,
the print of your hand,
still pressed like a hollow mark
never quite settling in.
Fading
A vision of you
slowly fading from my reach,
I watch your back turn,
engulfed in the darkened streams
as I lose you from my sight.
Corvid’s Cry
A corvid’s cry
flows through darkened woods at dusk,
echoes through the trees.
I walk beneath the wingbeat’s shade,
along paths never walked before.
Sometimes poetry feels less like writing and more like listening carefully enough for what’s already there.
— Jonna
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