Feb 23, 2018

POETRY FRIDAY: IT'S TANKA TIME (again)

Thank you to Liz Steinglass for hosting Poetry Friday today!
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South Carolina has officially slid into a spring-like weather pattern, and I am not sure how I feel about this. Everywhere I look, trees are blooming and spring bulbs are poking up through the ground, and yesterday it was almost 80 degrees where I live! Seriously!! I am not sure how I feel about this…as much as I love springtime, I feel like we barely had a winter here.

For this week’s Poetry Friday post, I was inspired to write a poem about our quick switch from winter to spring, and chose the tanka. Tanka poems are siblings of the Japanese haiku and follow a 5/7/5/7/7 syllabic format. They allow the author more room to “move around” within the poem, but still provide a relative close snapshot of the subject, which is what I love so much about haiku poetry. Here is my tanka:



Variations on a Theme
by Becky Shillington

Winter, where are you?
Outside, blooms make their debut
to birdsong, although
the calendar tells me it’s
February twenty-third.


I hope that, wherever you are today, the weather is just the way you like it this time of year! Have a wonderful weekend!