Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Angela Leuck: A Haiku Sequence and A Tanka String



THREE HAIKU FOR MY SON

Inspired by Kazuhiko Ito’s

dear brother
don’t forget this—
birds
flying through the sky
have heavy entrails                   
Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka
Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, trans., Cheng & Tsui, 2006


Dear son,
remember this:


birdsong after rain
isn’t music
to worms


the peace dove
shits on your head
just like any other bird


women
with sultry voices
don’t have to shout





FOUR TANKA

home from college
my older sister
sprawls on the sofa
brazenly reading
Lady Chatterley’s Lover


outside my window
the snow-covered
mountain
T.S. Eliot
climbed in his youth


dull gray day
I turn on the lights
at lunchtime--
how once I devoured
Koestler’s Darkness at Noon


to remind himself
how lucky he is
my husband
dips into
the Gulag Archipelago


Award winning haiku and tanka poet Angela Leuck has been published in journals and anthologies worldwide. Her poems were included in Haiku Journey, a video game by Hot Lava Games (2006). The author of Garden Meditations and a cicada in the cosmos (inkling press, 2010), haiku white and haiku noir (carve, 2007) and Flower Heart (Blue Ginkgo Press, 2006), she also has edited numerous anthologies. She is the founder and organizer of the Black Tea Haiku Group in Montreal, and in 2005, with Kozue Uzawa, she co-founded Tanka Canada and its biannual journal Gusts.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting how the poet is the only author in the four tankas cited by name rather than alluded to through the title of one of their books. Love these tankas!

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