92 Tanka

These 92 Tanka were written over the 92 days of Spring, 2021. A Tanka is an old Japanese style of poetry with 31 syllables. The first three lines are traditionally 5-7-5, like haiku and the last two lines are both 7 syllables long. The syllable requirements aren't hard and fast -- there's nothing hard and fast about poetry, really -- and so these poems abandon that syllabic structure. Traditional Japanese isn't a syllabic language and these poems are an attempt to work it out in word or image units.