It snows everyday! I blew snow yesterday morning after the weekend’s buildup, then it snowed again. Every morning we see a large herd of deer in the alfalfa field below our house. I know they find good grazing in the dried alfalfa stems beneath the snow. They started appearing as soon as hunting season ended. The other day as we drove along I-94 we saw two deer step out of a cornfield with no cares in the world.
Last week I printed a few of the poems that have been carried in the Ribbons magazine that is published by the Tanka Society of America. Here are a couple more with some background as to how they came about.
the morning sun
rises on veiled buttes
spreading its light
with the wings
of soaring hawks
This appeared in “The Tanka Café” section of the magazine and since its editor called for poems to be written with the theme “Things that Fly” for this edition I came up with this one. I couldn’t resist referring to the landscape that unrolls from here on to the west. Buttes and hawks, so prevalent, are easy to write of in combination with each other.
…
due south
Little Heart Butte
pokes from the surface
a lump on the skin
prominent yet benign
Some time ago a local columnist in our newspaper referred to the Little Heart Butte as a pimple on the ground. This butte rises prominently just a few miles south of my home, and I look at it often. Since it is more conical in shape than the commonly thought of flat-topped butte, it could be a metaphor for skin eruption. I took that idea and developed it into the foregoing tanka that appeared in the open-entry part of the magazine.
The next theme for “The Tanka Café” is Art and Artlessness. Lucky for me, the editor states “Generally, restrictions will be few and almost any treatment will be acceptable. The overall challenge will be to submit one’s very best effort.” I guess my work is cut out for me, so I’d better get started. Of course, high-flying balloons always come back to the ground. I just received a notice from another magazine to which I had submitted a group of poems. They rejected every one of them.
