Tanka Fun
We were playing cards in the woods around a picnic table one night by the light of a few candles. It was the last night of the Spring Break backpacking trip. One of us pointed out that the moon was a really thin crescent. Fricke made a comment about how it looked like a Cheshire cat smiling in the trees. The saying stuck out to me. I wanted to write a poem about the scene because in my poetry class we’ve been talking about filling your poems with strong images rather than just a bunch of wishy-washy watery language. I ended up trying to write a tanka poem, which is like a haiku except that it’s 5-7-5-7-7 instead of 5-7-5. Don’t ask me why. I get the feeling that a lot of why it’s cool to write haikus is lost when you translate it from Japanese. Anyway, I was interested in tankas and haikus because they pack a lot of image into a small amount of words. Here is version one of the poem:
Backpacking
A black, starless sky
the moon is a Cheshire cat
smiling through the trees
as we play cards by its light
around a picnic table.
So that’s the poem. I posted it here, though, mainly because I got a kick out of reworking it. At my friend Mike’s suggestion, I used a free online translation service (Babel Fish) to translate the poem into another language and then back into English. He said the result is always "more poetic" (i.e. funnier). I chose Portuguese.
A black color, sky starless
the moon is a cat of Cheshire
that smiles through the trees
because we play cards for its light
around a table of the picnic.
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