Tanka Poem

This prompt combines writing and walking.

The goal is to write one or more tanka poems, which are 3- or 5-lines each, related to walking and careful looking/sensing. The tanka is a Japanese form and generally has 31 syllables distributed across five lines. But we can be flexible! (I can't imagine counting syllables, but whatever...)

The prompt comes from poet Harryette Mullen who began what she calls a "Tanka Diary" or daybook, of poems, one written each day based on a walk.

Mullen cheerfully reimagines the form to suit her needs: "While embracing the notational spirit of this tradition, I depart from established convention in both languages, choosing instead a flexible three-line form with a variable number of syllables per line." As a Black writer in LA, Mullen's poems reflect experiences of living in a huge city and dealing with racism, as well as her love for botanical terms and everyday beauty. In her book Urban Tumbleweed, Mullen focuses specifically on the intersection of natural beauty and urban existence... 

A few examples:

Within territorial boundaries of
contested city blocks, yellow fire hydrants
are marked with graffiti signatures.

There I went, leaving only my footprints.
Returning, I brought back nothing but
the dust that clings to the sole of a wanderer.

When you see me walking in the neighborhood,
stopping to admire your garden, I might be
composing a tanka in my head.

Poet Jeanne Emrich has provided a helpful guide for writing a 5-line tanka:

1. Think of one or two simple images from a moment you have experienced and describe them in concrete terms – what you have seen, tasted, touched, smelled, or heard. Write the description in two or three lines.

2. Reflect on how you felt or what you were thinking when you experienced this moment or perhaps later when you had time to think about it.

3. Describe these feelings or thoughts in the remaining two or three lines.

4. Combine all five lines.

5. Consider turning the third line of your poem into a pivot line, that is, a line that refers both to the top two lines as well as to the bottom two lines, so that either way they make sense grammatically. To do that, you may have to switch lines around.

Her full list of instructions includes an example.

So: take a walk; attend to some detail on the walk; make that the center of a poem of 3-5 lines; pivot in the middle of the poem; and see what happens! Maybe you can find a contrast similar to Mullen's and use that to focus your poems... Write one, or do this repeatedly to see how ideas and poems might accrete...