Poetry is the art of communicating ideas, impressions and feelings. With words as our medium, we can tell a tale, bring smiles or tears, or arrive at a distant land. A poem is the arrangement of words in rhythmic composition that expresses ideas, facts, images and emotions in a manner more concentrated, more imaginative, more beautiful and more powerful than daily speech. Tanka Tanka which is Japanese for short poem, are mood verses. They can be about love, seasons, sadness, the shortness of life.
Tankas use strong images and poetic devices such as metaphors, and personification that haiku avoid.
Basic tanka is five lines long, with the first and third being shorter than the second, fourth and fifth. A Haibun Dirt, rocks, clay, the whole earth curves to the half-lit sky. A buzzard, weightless, rises on the updraft alone like a girl among strangers. Stars wash out as warmth colors the fields. My eyes follow blooms slipping off my shoe, paused while I breathe on a path turning quietly hillside.