Angela Leuck: A Haiku Sequence and A Tanka String

THREE HAIKU FOR MY SON

Inspired by Kazuhiko Ito’s

dear brother

don’t forget this—

birds

flying through the sky

have heavy entrails                   

Ferris Wheel: 101 Modern and Contemporary Tanka, 

Kozue Uzawa and Amelia Fielden, trans., Cheng & Tsui, 2006

Dear son,

remember this:

birdsong after rain

isn’t music

to worms

the peace dove

shits on your head

just like any other bird

women

with sultry voices

don’t have to shout

FOUR TANKA

home from college

my older sister

sprawls on the sofa

brazenly reading

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

outside my window

the snow-covered

mountain

T.S. Eliot

climbed in his youth

dull gray day

I turn on the lights

at lunchtime--

how once I devoured

Koestler’s Darkness at Noon

to remind himself

how lucky he is

my husband

dips into

the Gulag Archipelago

Award winning haiku and tanka poet Angela Leuck has been published in journals and anthologies worldwide. Her poems were included in Haiku Journey, a video game by Hot Lava Games (2006). The author of Garden Meditations and a cicada in the cosmos (inkling press, 2010), haiku white and haiku noir (carve, 2007) and Flower Heart (Blue Ginkgo Press, 2006), she also has edited numerous anthologies. She is the founder and organizer of the Black Tea Haiku Group in Montreal, and in 2005, with Kozue Uzawa, she co-founded Tanka Canada and its biannual journal Gusts.