This is the 2nd week of the Heavy Snow (December 7 – 20) season for Colleen Chesebro’s #TankaTuesday challenge based on the 24 Japanese seasons.
The challenge this week is to write three kimos, which are an Israeli form of haiku. Colleen suggested three kigo phrases to use in the three. A kimo has 10, 7, 6 lines and is fairly static. Here are the kigo phrases:
- #1:“buying a new calender” (7 syllables)
- #2:“winter desolation” (6 syllables)
- #3:“trimming the Christmas tree” (6 syllables)
Here are my kimos:
almost at the end of a painful year
buying a new calendar
brings me hope for healing
***
remembering his proposal to her
on the twelfth of December
winter jubilation
***
on my mother’s floor they gather around
to celebrate together
trimming the Christmas tree
The first poem is obvious. This has been a pretty bad year on a global scale.
The second poem is about my daughter and SIL’s engagement several years ago. It was on December 12. Then they married in the courthouse on March 12 during Covid and had a big wedding on February 12 almost two years ago. As Colleen points out in her #tankatuesday post, this is the 12th season. We are also in the 12th month by our calendar. Notice that I turned the kigo “winter desolation” around, making it “winter jubilation.” I wanted to write about daughter’s love of twelve and didn’t want it negative.
The third poem is about my mother’s retirement community.
On Sunday, the journal Roi Fainéant Press and its EIC Tiffany M. Storrs published my new Remedios Varo-inspired tiny story, Mimesis. This one is just as weird as the others, and it does have a cat as an important character. https://www.roifaineantpress.com/post/mimesis-by-luanne-castle?fbclid=IwAR0J2DQ4KmcmG_l1Iw8te2MYMXtAw6ydZfm11MEr68lrlFXVBZIJgVMv0Wk