dirty snow
my neighbor’s
cigarette
smoke
drifting
______________
Two tanka in one week? What is this? Am I losing my knack for brevity?
Actually, as with the last one I wrote, this is plenty brief enough to be a haiku — twelve syllables. It just seems to work better as a five-liner, because of what it says and what it alludes to. I’m actually still not sure what to call things like this, haiku or tanka or gogyoghka or micropoems … but it probably doesn’t matter, except to obsessive-compulsive types like me.
Red Dragonfly 
call it yours. your way. and that’s that. yick, i can smell taste and blah that dirty snow. funny how potent this is for me. …not having commented on you blog for a while, may be you were missing my lengthy ramblings – thus – a 5 liner.
Of course I was missing them, Rick. It’s been so quiet around here without you. 🙂
Yeah, for some reason this one is really potent to me too. Maybe because there are not that many haiku that deal with unpleasant sights and sensations? And just … all that dirt. White and black. Yick and blah is right.
It happens. It happens. It’s always happening to me, too! And I’ve heard it especially from striving haiku writers, to which I belong. No haiku a day seems to them, to us, like a world folding away–which makes you a heroine at least to me because unlike you, I melt with the loam of haiku lines where you pursue them. And behold, a haiku-a-day it is!
Thanks again for keeping this up, keeping me, for one, alive in haiku!
Thanks to you for your encouragement! (And by the way, the present is in the mail. Let me know when it arrives, because I am nervous about it being detained by those pesky Customs officials.)
As far as I’m concerned, this is a haiku. And this lineation stretches out the experience and layers of the haiku through the use of half-meaning and mimesis.
I’m inclined to agree with you about it being a haiku, Michael. It has the content if not the expected shape of a haiku. Tanka is trying to do something different than this is.
Thanks for reading this so seriously.