SALAD ANNIVERSARY
written by ;
Machi Tawara
These are my favorite modern TANKA from
SALAD ANNIVERSARY/Machi Tawara and I wanted introduce to you.
Tanka (or Haiku) is very short poem it form has 5-7-5-7-7 in Japanese,
we can understand of auther's feelings as same as long poems.
Also I think how nice if I could share it with my love!
Ok,, next is your turn,
Let's try as a means for your love-hunting and enjoy Tanka (or Haiku) !! :-)
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I check my tear-stained reflection,
remembering that you said,
"Stay beautiful".
Eating takeout Sushi with you,
only 300 yen--
tastes so good I know I'm in Love.
Shielded by you in a crowded train,
I gaze up close
at fine down on your face.
With you,for better or worse,
even when I'm gargling
I feel like a woman.
The smell of you dances on the salt breeze
and in your arms
I turn into a seashell.
"Call again," you say, and hang up--
I want to call again
right now.
A mourning of waiting for you--
at four,at five-thirty, again at six,
I check the alarm clock dial.
"Today the public bath was closed"
I want to spend every day
talking of little things like that.
"Today makes exactly 500 days
since we met," he whispers--
surprised, I jump away.
Passing each other on escalators
headed in opposite ways--
happy to be with you if only for a moment.
Forgiven
their inability to express tenderness--
men of my father's generation.
Eighty kilometers an hour--
clinging to your back, I'm the wind--
now there is only my arms around you.
"Life should be dramatic!" you declare--
for me a dramatic
supporting role.
The number 12 is sweet--
I live to hear your voice
at mid night.
Folding towels,
I wrap the smell of the sun--
perhaps one day I too shall be a mother.
"This tastes great," you said and so
the sixth of July--
our salad anniversary.
It is ironic that (if we may believe her) Machi Tawara
has no real lover; these real--sounding love poems spring largely
from imagination,based (she says shyly) not on a particular
longing for any one person so much asageneral longing for
human contact. That her poems have moved the hearts of so many.
Touching the lives of millions of people with whom she would
never other wise have had communication,seems to please her enormously.
-Juliet Winters Carpenter-