This is a tanka card from Japan. It has a related picture and
one line of the 5-line poem on one side. On the other it has the whole poem.
There are 100 such in the tanka canon which Japanese children often memorize.
Here is a translation from my friend Paula Doe:
In the deep mountains,
cutting through the autumn leaves,
the cry of the deer.
When I hear it,
autumn sadness, loneliness.
I like to teach tankas, though I put no pressure on kids to
conform to the traditional short/long/short/long/long format. I like the other
feature of them – they tend to start with something concrete and move to the emotional. I especially like to teach tankas at the end of the
school year when kids are saying goodbye to a classroom or sometimes even
graduating to a new school. What physical things will you remember about this
year or time of your life?
Here are some tankas from students at Cali Calmécac about to
move on to middle school.
Tanka – RENE
TOLSON
Green, itchy field
A surface to play sports on.
Oval –shaped
Memories
of making bracelets and jump ropes out of flowers.
Saying
bye to the times in first grade.
Monkey Bars – ROGELIO
CRUZ
Yellow monkey bars.
Swinging from metal bar to
metal bar.
Blisters on our hands.
Racing each other to the
other end.
Sorry, monkey bars, but we
have to leave.
And a group poem from kids at
Monroe:
Bench – ROOM 9
Chipped blue paint
on a broken wooden bench
squeaks when you sit
down because you got in trouble
but it holds favorite memories of hanging out.
No comments:
Post a Comment