Ribbons, Volume 18, Number 2, Spring/Summer 2022

smooth bark

etched with script lichen

we understand

this secret language

better than our own

My thanks to Ryland Shengzhi Li for including my work in the "Contemplative Reading" section of his essay, Deepening Your Reading of Tanka:

a raven

believed it could fly

through me

unaware that I am glass,

pretending to be sky

(Third Place, 2020 San Francisco International Competition for Haiku, Senryu and Tanka)

Again, I suggest you try the contemplative reading yourself and reflect on your experience before moving on.

The word that most touches me is "pretending." I feel discomfort. I identify with the glass and feel that I am deceiving the raven, which I take as other people in my life. I also feel guilt and shame blocking me from being my true self. And I feel called to tell the truth and to be true, so as not to hurt others.

In the final contemplation, I realize that the one who suffers most from my deception is not others, but myself. When the raven hits glass, it is the glass that shatters. Like the glass, I am fragile and vulnerable, but also beautiful and worthy of existing in my own right. The earlier call to tell the truth for the sake of not hurting others reflects my empathy for them. But I need to balance that with care for myself and my own needs, which I find all too easy to neglect.

Oddly, when I first read this poem, it did not speak to me. But my contemplative reading helped me to experience the poem in its many layers, and through the poem, to experience layers of myself. Native American poet Joy Harjo describes it like this: when you begin to listen to poetry, you begin to listen to the stones, to clouds, to others—and most importantly, you "begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else".