W - Waka: Wrestlers I

-

 The Waka is a 5-line Japanese poem which is sometimes confused with the tanka.  Both have a 5/7/5/7/7 syllable structure, however the Waka's lines are arranged in a particular way.  The first 2 lines make up one piece, the second 2 lines another, then the final line can be part of the second group, or stand on its own. 

Wrestlers I (there is another I call Wrestlers II) was painted in 1960 by my father, Win Smith.


as in ancient Greece

the three men wrestle naked


the early morning

sunrise seeps through open doors


shadows dance on the gym floor


©2026 Lisa Smith Nelson. All Rights Reserved  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Where Are the Friends?

-
Image
dVerse   MTB: Ubi Sunt and that Where, Oh Where?   And our MTB prompt today is simply to use this Ubi Sunt motif in your poetry as such: title your poem with the question – where are the/they… use the questioning within your poem, even with repetition DO NOT ANSWER it though – the questioning is rhetorical employ concepts of mortality, the transience of life, a sense of nostalgia ubi sunt is a term meaning "where are they??" taken from the Latin phrase "ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt," or "where are those who were before us?"   Where are the friends who promised forever? Who vowed a cradle to grave? Where are the sisters who pricked their thumbs? Who undying kinship gave? Have they forgotten those carefree days? Broken our childhood pact? Have they forgotten we were as one? Ignoring our solemn act? Where are the friends we used to know? Those we held so dear? Where are the ones on whose sides we stood? W...
Read more

Ghost House

-
Image
The Sunday Muse #137 photo prompt        The sun set for the last time on the condemned farm house. I stand at a distance where I can see the golden horizon reflected in the glass windows.        I never knew this house when it was inhabited by anyone but ghosts.   Those specters are why its windows are still intact. No one has dared to break the glass for fear of opening the floodgates for spirits and ghouls.         Ghosts of the murdered…      …and murderers alike.           Something unholy, something unspeakable, occurred here.   Something no one talks about.   Those old enough to remember claim they don’t.   The local newspaper archives were lost to a mysterious fire.   Vague references to the murders exist only in faded, yellowed journals, dismissed as the rantings of paranoid farm-wives. No one questions. They’re af...
Read more

What Do Mothers Know?

-
  dVerse prompt for Sept. 9, 2024 For your Prosery prompt, I have selected the first line from her (Tina Chang) poem “Love”: “ I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know. ” Write a piece of prosery of up to or exactly 144 words, including the given line in the order in which it has been given. You may add or change punctuation, but you may not add or delete words. I purposely did not read the rest of Tina Chang's poem, as to not influence my first thoughts by her words and their meanings.  I was recalled back to an overheard conversation between a group of teenage girls, who didn't realize I could hear.  They were trying to come up with alternative ways they could have gotten "hickeys," or "love bites," what to tell their parents.  I laughed and told them  their  parents told  their  parents those exact same things, and no one was fooled!  No one would believe they "ran into a door knob," yet that's one that seems to pass through the ge...
Read more