What do we want? Justice. When do I want it? After You.
a 1970's demonstration students workers against the cutbacks take over admin
building sit crowded cramped cross-legged listen to speeches blocking a door when
you fall asleep your head on my lap
who is this person to rest on a stranger so like a child no deception or guile
I take you home to find out
ReadWritePoem prompt Day 7: Write and capture a humorous incident related to love in a 5-line love poem called a tanka.
1. Describe in concrete terms one or two simple images (two or three lines) from your humorous love encounter, not just what you saw but also what you tasted, touched, smelled or heard.
2. What were you were thinking at the time this love encounter happened? Write that down, too, as two or three lines, so you have five lines in total for the poem.
3. Think about making the third line of your poem into a pivot line, so that it links to both the previous two lines and to the final two lines.
4. Test the tanka by dividing it into two parts so the third line acts both as the last line of the first part and as the first line of the second part. Does each section make sense separately, and then together?
5. Think about reducing — and even avoiding — capitalization and punctuation because a tanka needn’t be like a sentence or merely a flat statement.
Comments
Taking off for battle only to find my way home........
there i was wearing my US Air Force flight suit, ready for action
to take off and demonstrate our protest over the assault on Humanities
my human condition was looking for love in the midst of rebellion
an angry young man drawn to the nurturing bosom of a kind loving woman
awakened to the angry lover on his way out, on my way back home......
day 7 tanka
i yeah, those were the days my friend we thought they'd never end.... we were so innocent in our endeavor to be free from government bonds... erotic engine
Poem 7
I enjoyed this poem with a certain nostalgia.We were much more militant as young things then. I like us!
I like this, the final line,
I like this, the final line, especially.
also picking up poetry again after about the same span, but no courage for readings.
tanka
protest and intimacy...go together for sure...especially in poetry.....thanks for taking me back to the '60s
justice after you
I absolutely loved how you coupled two of my favorite topics for poetry, protest and intimacy (though rarely in the same poem). So well done!
!
This is such a great story - it makes me really hope that it actually happened to somebody.
I like how this seems to be half poem and half prose. Those longer lines make the 3rd and 5th really stand out....
true story
and it's the reason I started writing poetry for the first time again last August after a hiatus of almost thirty years. I found my old lover, the one in the poem, on FaceBook, and he wrote back his answer to my query in a poem, and I answered in a poem and here I am, eight months later, reading Monday nights at Three Friends Open Mic, and trying to write poem a day. Words are as addicting as love, and I should probably write a poem about that!
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