Night's Eye tanka

→ comments welcome; critique not desired at this time

First-place winner in Innsmouth Free Press's 2010 Poe-themed haiku contest. From the author's 2014 collection Fragments of Eternity.

I'm not a big fan at all of the 5-7-5 syllable pattern in English haiku. Poems written that way seem to be too long, to contain too much information for a true haiku. Moreover, a haiku shouldn't be a single full sentence; following the Japanese spirit of the form, they should be more fragmentary, more impressionistic. But something like this is still what most people in the West still think of as haiku and it's often what they're looking for in contests, so I conformed. (I don't mind too much; I got some cool prizes from it. ) It's actually a gogyōshi (or modern tanka), a form written in five phrases rather than three and typically (in English-language publications anyway) presented on five lines:

The moon,
like night's eye,
looks down,
illuminating
a girl's gazeless stare.

I advise all English-language poets to consider formatting their longer haiku as gogyōshi; if it doesn't work, then it doesn't work, but more often than not seventeen syllables are enough to produce the necessary five phrases.

This poem is made available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license*. You are free to use the work for non-commercial purposes, including creating derivative works, but you must attribute the author, provide a link back to the original work, and release your work under the same or a similar license. You must also provide a link to the appropriate CC license so others understand these rights.



*Please note that the license is listed as v3.0 in the sidebar. deviantART's interface automatically assigns this version and does not allow for manual changes. While most of my CC-licensed work uses v3.0, this piece is indeed licensed for use under v4.0.

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Eight of the twenty-four poems contained in Fragments of Eternity are available to read here at deviantART. The others are:

• Here Comes the Storm
• Falling Tree gogyōshi
• Stanley Park shaped tanka
• Rural Oregon tanka
• Light and Darkness tanka
• Calligraphy gogyōshi
• Fragments of Eternity

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Featured 2014-09-25 as a #HaikuOfTheDay on Multhaiku's Twitter account, GenreHaiku.

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For a visual representation that closely (although not exactly) resembles the scene I had in mind when I wrote this, check out Missing, by la-chatte-noire: