28th January '26 Featuring poet: Cherie Hunter Day

hosts: Firdaus Parvez, Kala Ramesh, Priti Aisola & Suraja Menon Roychowdhury

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

28th January, 2026

poet of the month: Cherie Hunter Day

status update

about orienteering

with his daughter

his gift of a compass

after I lost my way

Ribbons 9:1 (2013)

waiting all day

for sunlight to lose

its blue wavelengths

the camera lens picks up

each intrusion of shadow

Skylark 2:1 (2014) 

I examine

the creases on the palms

of my hands

garden soil darkening

both versions of my life

American Tanka 24 (2015)

Christmas cactus

with purple-tinted leaves

a sign of stress

my son’s fake laugh

when chatting with his friends

American Tanka 27 (2016)

Cherie, we thank you warmly for sharing your poems and your thoughtful responses to our questions. Please continue to visit and share your poetry with us :).

More about the poet:

Cherie Hunter Day poet, editor, illustrator, graphic artist, and collagist. She began writing tanka in 1993 and her first tanka chapbook, Sun, Moon, Mother, Father was published in 1997. Her work has appeared in tanka anthologies such as Wind Five-Folded (1994), In a Ship’s Wake (2001), The Tanka Anthology (2003), Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 4 (2009 – 2012), Tanka 2020 (2020), and journals including: Five Lines Down, Tangled Hair, red lights, American Tanka, Ribbons, Skylark, Presence, and hedgerow. In 1999 her collection, Early Indigo won the Snapshot Press Tanka Collection Award and was published in 2000. A book of responsive tanka with David Rice, Kindle of Green, followed in 2008. In 2012 she won the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award for A Color for Leaving, which was released in 2017. Her most recent collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (2023), contains haibun and tanka prose. She lives in Auburn, New Hampshire with her husband and son.

6.

TTH: Do you show your work in progress to anyone, or is it a solitary art that you keep close to your chest before letting it go for publishing? 

Carl Jung saw loneliness not as an absence of people but the inability to communicate what is important to you. Periods of isolation invite us to withdraw from the collective mindset and focus on our inner world. It is in this solitude that we engage our emotions and create art.

I don’t show my work to anyone before I send it out for publication. I do allow for time “in the drawer” to let it age. I’m often enamored with a piece immediately after I write it and don’t see the flaws. Time provides the necessary distance to gain some perspective. After a period of days or weeks, it becomes easier to revise the poem before I send it out for consideration. If the tanka isn’t selected, I look at ways to refine my expression. Some tanka seem to write themselves, while others take years, even decades to come to fruition. I must be patient. The goal is to share poems with others and build connections.

Your Challenge This Week:

Cherie's tanka - so varied in topics and yet getting at a core feeling, an emotion that you can immediately identify with. Inspired by her elegant work, feel free to write on any topic that moves you.

Have fun!

And remember – tanka, because of those two extra lines, lends itself most beautifully when revealing a story. And tanka prose is storytelling.

Give these ideas some thought and share your tanka and tanka-prose with us here. Keep your senses open, observe things that happen around you and write. You can post tanka and tanka-prose outside of these themes as well.

PLEASE NOTE

1. Post only one poem at a time, only one per day.

2. Only 2 tanka and two tanka-prose per poet per prompt.

Tanka art, of course, if you want to.

3. Share your best-polished pieces.

4. Please do not post something in a hurry or something you have just written. Let it simmer for a while.

5. Post your final edited version on top of your original verse.

6. Don't forget to give feedback on others' poems.

We are delighted to open the comment thread for you to share your unpublished tanka and tanka-prose (within 250 words) to be considered for inclusion in the haikuKATHA monthly magazine.