So, the tanka for originated in Japan, like the haiku and others… but it is a little different that the haiku. The Japanese tanka is a 5 line, 5-7-5-7-7 syllable count, poem. It focuses on a moment in time and allows for imagery and metaphor which haiku tend to avoid. The rules that the tanka does follow are… loose and up to interpretation in many respects. The tanka, in English, seems to benefit from attention to the meter of the line, more than the exact syllable count. There are a lot of interesting resources on the form, I’ll let you do your own research.
Here’s what I came up with:
Accident
They had to pry the
rumpled sweatshirt from her hands
as the rain fell lightly
over the road and the wreck
that left her alone in the world.
Copyright ©2019 Tim Geoghegan, all rights reserved.
Cheers!