Here is the second of three tanka published in GUSTS, no. 34, Contemporary Tanka, Fall/Winter 2021.
The pandemic has made all of us look at life and death differently and perhaps more clearly.
one day when I am
long gone from the world,
you’ll find me here
& there among scarlet leaves
or blue damselflies
In the latest issue, GUSTS no. 34, Contemporary Tanka, Fall/Winter 2021, I am lucky enough to have three tanka published. I’ve read through the whole journal twice so far to enjoy the excellent submissions from such a wide variety of poets. Paper journals are especially nice in that you have them at hand when you need something good to read.
Here is one of the tanka I wrote:
growing old together
we make light of losing
thoughts or words –
even now I fall in love
with you again
Like so many other people, the year and a half pandemic has thrown my sense of time way off. I’m so far behind in posting newly published poems on this blog that I find myself now playing catch up. I am both honored and happy to have had such fine journals select some of my work to publish in 2021.
both of us relieved
we made it to this side
of the pandemic –
falling back in love
with spring’s soft greening
Published in Ribbons, Tanka Café, Spring 2021
My thanks to Michael McClintock, editor of the Tanka Café in Ribbons, the Journal of the Tanka Society of America. The prompt was poems of spring and summer. Here is mine:
I love Georgia O’Keefe’s quirky paintings and perspective. She did a lot of work using skulls, which seems quite natural. New Mexico must yield all sorts of bones in the mountains and deserts. Just as she studied and painted flowers, so she did the same with animal bones and skulls. She was very prolific in her work, painting a skull or pelvis in many views, often accompanied by a flower or other desert item. Many didn’t like her bone paintings, but that didn’t deter her in the slightest. Even her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz, was initially critical of them. He later relented, as did most critics. To find beauty in death and decomposition and to create art that is somehow mesmerizing and thoughtful is quite an accomplishment.
This poem is from my chapbook (Erasing the Doubt (c) 2015, Finishing Line Press). It is hidden amongst just a few of these wonderful paintings.
Georgia O’Keefe and cow skull
Bob’s Steer Head by Georgia O’Keefe (c) 1936
Cow’s Skull with Calico Roses by Georgia O’Keefe (c) 1931
On Viewing a Skull Painting by Georgia O’Keeffe
- The Artist’s View of the Skull as Form
The sinuous curve
hollowed circle
smooth chalky bone
worn smooth, it goes
beyond the form
behind the slow dip
of the arching eye
twisting and curving
back on itself
2. The Skull’s Perspective
At first it all felt wrong,
reversed, bent forward
in a geometric embrace
of mass and space,
the brush stroke
through the hollow eye
that will never see,
beyond to the delicate shell
of the brain
that will never again think,
moving slowly
into that shadow of light
the sky insinuates itself in color
and it is there
that you alone can wander,
deep inside the form that is me
Georgia O’Keeffe, Ram’s Skull with Hollyhock, (c) 1935
Deer’s Skull with Pedernal by Georgia O’Keefe (c) 1936
Campanula sp, Blue Bellflower. – Watercolour by Greta Mulligan (Australia)
A Poet in Time 