when my tempestuous love
grows too fierce —
I drown in passion
tangled with your absence
in a sea of unrequited love
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Author Notes
A TANKA inspired by MADAME BUTTERFLY, an opera by Giacomo Puccini from
1904.
PLOT: An American naval officer, Lieutenant Benjamin Pinkerton, arrives in Japan to work on a ship docked in Nagasaki. To make a better impression, he takes a Japanese wife and house for the duration of his stay there. His young bride, Cho-Cho-San, is a geisha.
After a few weeks, Pinkerton leaves Japan and his young wife after he gets the job. In his absence, she gives birth to a son whom she names Trouble.
As time goes by, Cho-Cho-San is still convinced that Pinkerton will return to her someday.
A week later, she sees a passenger steamer in the harbor. On the deck is Pinkerton with a young blonde woman who turns out to be his new American wife. Pinkerton and his new wife intend to take Cho-Cho-San's son to America.
In despair, Cho-Cho-San rushes home. She bids farewell to the baby boy and his nurse and shuts herself in her room to commit suicide with her father's sword. After the first thrust of the sword, she hesitates. Although she is bleeding the wound is not fatal. As she raises the sword again, her baby starts to cry and she changes her mind. She takes the baby and leaves her home. When Mr. Pinkerton called the next day, the little house was quite empty. to read the complete story click here
Tanka is a Japanese unrhymed poem having about 12 to 31 syllables usually arranged in five lines and read in about two breaths in length when read aloud. The first poets who wrote tanka imitated the Japanese models of a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic structure in five lines. This resulted in poems that were too long in comparison to Japanese tanka. The first tanka were padded or chopped to meet the fixed number of syllables. Additionally, the third line must transition from the descriptive and image-focused beginning lines into a reflective metaphor, simile, or personification for the closing lines. The subject matter varies, but most tanka are emotionally stirring or profound, and many are about love. click here if you want to read modern tanka examples === click here to read Tanka Society of America === click here if you want to read modern tanka rules
Thank you very much for your time and kind review.
Gypsy
"The poet waits quietly to paint the unsaid." --Atticus
pictures from pinterest
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