FIVE SENRYŪ
Blind Date
Scrabble tiles spilled
across the bedroom floor—
no one keeping score.
During One of Mahler’s Endless Adagios
The crinkled crackling
of a lozenge being unwrapped
followed by a yawn—
The Honeymoon
My body is not
Afghanistan so perhaps
it’s time you pull out.
Occupied
when he unzipped
to display his sizable
stimulus package—
Spring Is Here
With cherry blossoms
swirling again around us—
stop talking so much!
—from Rattle #47, Spring 2015
Tribute to Japanese Forms
__________
Timothy Liu: “As a fan of short syllabic poems, I’ve been writing haiku (5–7–5) and tanka (5–7–5–7–7) for decades and keep them in a special file. I almost never send to haiku journals because they don’t publish the sorts of things I like to read. As for American letters, I think there’s a distrust of poems of such brevity (unless they’re translations of Basho!), so I mostly keep these little gem-like forms to my lonesome.” (website)
