Two tanka of mine appeared in the last issue of Ribbons, the journal of the Tanka Society of America.
Ribbons, Fall 2017: Volume 13, Number 3
still collecting dolls
into her old age
a special name for each –
and one story
she refused to tell
Tanka Café, Fall 2017: theme was “paper”
a book propped
by the pillow on my knees,
page after page
I ease into someone
else’s life
Gusts, Contemporary Tanka, one of my favorite print journals, arrived here in London this week. Edited by Kozue Uzawa, the journal is a publication of Tanka Canada. The tanka are placed on the page under a category heading such as “life,” “scent,” “moon,” or “relationships.” Many of my favorite tanka poets appear in this journal, and of course it’s always great to discover new poets or poets whose work I don’t know. The overall quality and standard is very high, and this makes for excellent reading and rereading. I’m pleased to say that three of my tanka appear in Gusts, no. 25, Contemporary Tanka, Spring/Summer 2017. I hope you enjoy reading them.
watching clouds
begin to drift
from your soft sable brushes –
you make the sky bluer
than blue, not grey
the shivery silk
of your words
slips around me –
the first line of us
now written
all that time waiting
to hear from you
I ascend the stairway
of a deserted station,
pale Freesias in hand
These three tanka were written by Mary Kendall, (c) 2017,
Gusts, no. 25, Contemporary Tanka, Spring/Summer 2017
The fall issue of cattails is out at last. Due to a big switch around of editors, the September issue was delayed and is now published in December. What a big issue it is, full of so many poems to read. Many of my favorite poets are in this issue and there are some who are new to me still to be discovered.
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I have two haiku included in this issue:
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first blossoms –
I tell myself this year
will be different.
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daybreak …
the birds wake us
song by song.
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and a few senryu:
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long yawns …
breathing in
his boredom.
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zafu zabuton zazen zzzzz
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plus one tanka:
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long ago I heard
the sound of wuthering wind
blowing through the night –
a bleakness so forlorn,
a loneliness bereft of words.
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My thanks to all the editors of cattails for their hard work. I cannot begin to imagine the number of hours it takes to put together something this substantial.
Who are we really? We can present ourself to the world in many ways, and we do. It’s been quite a while since I posted a longer poem on my blog, so today I offer you a poem called “Mask Maker.” It was written to an ekphrastic prompt on Rattle a few months back, but it was not selected. The two winning poems were brilliant and should have been chosen.
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What’s great about writing to a good prompt is how an image can pull all sorts of ideas from us. The prompt was a picture of several sets of hands modeling in clay. I toyed with the idea for quite some time and discarded two other poems until I settled on the one that grew into this poem.
Mask Maker
Do you like this mask, the one I made
so carefully, molding it to the contours
of my face so it looks just like me?
I wear it day after day, occasionally
slipping it off and refashioning it a bit.
It changes as I change.
I was four when I made the first mask—
out of mud from the bare earth in the yard.
It blocked my fear, and hid my thoughts.
I was invisible to the world, hidden behind
this new cover. No one noticed when I wore it,
so I kept it on, and it protected me.
Once it nearly shattered during that long fall
down the stairs that he never spoke about.
Dazed, I woke up and checked the mask.
It was the one thing that hadn’t been hurt.
After that I knew I needed it to keep me safe,
to keep me quiet, to keep me out of the way.
When I closed my eyes, I could imagine it was
no longer a mask but just me, unseen by him.
It made me look like a normal girl, a good girl.
After many years and many masks, I became
quite good at molding a mask so flawlessly thin,
so delicate, transparent as a butterfly wing.
It was easy to slip on, and no one could tell
what was real and what was not, even up close.
It worked, and that’s all I ever wanted.
There is a small secret I learned from making
masks and wearing them day and night:
You must believe it’s you and not a mask.
It is you, but a different you, a you that won’t
cry out or tell secrets or even cringe too much
when unexpected blows come (and they do).
Close your eyes now. Imagine yourself this
way—in control and protected from the world,
safe from everything you fear, hidden far away
behind this lovely mask where you can watch
what’s going on, where you can be vigilant,
and where you are the real you only you can see.
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