TANKA TAKE HOME — 15th April 2026 Featuring poet: Pravat Kumar Padhy

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

Introducing a new perspective to our Wednesday Feature!

15th April 2026

poet of the month: Pravat Kumar Padhy

her cloth

soaked with tears…

on the edge 

of curled green leaf

the burden of the heavy rains  

Cold Moon Journal, 15 October 2000 (Ed. Roberta Beach Jacobson)

Windrows

You roll along the trails of forests, garden paths, backyards, and busy city streets. The melodic rustle down the hills silently folds in the corner of the valley. People often listen to your swishing muse with the wind. You have no remorse as you take a transient path. Perhaps you wish to offer room for others to flourish. In your final journey under the sun and the moon, intently you mingle with the earth, the mother of all inhabitants. You still bustle in various forms to nurture new life under the warm sun and gentle rain. Walking down the lane less traveled, I lift the fallen leaf and imagine the height of its richness, the depth of its value, and the weight of its wealth.

 behind thick foliage

the sun plays hide and seek

roots of family tree

extend all around

braiding past with present 

Contemporary Haibun Online 21.2 August 2025 (Guest Ed. Margi Abraham)

We thank Pravat Kumar Padhy warmly for sharing his poems and for his thoughtful responses to our questions.

Q3.

TTH: How do you develop a tanka? Please guide us through the stages of a poem. 

PKP: Whenever I encounter a visual image, it instantly takes the form of a poetic framework. I strive to align my outer world with my inner feelings through the spirit of tanka. I always try to make the pivot line literary enough to create an effective “link-and-shift” in the poem with lyrical beauty and resonance. 

Q4.

TTH: Who are your favourite tanka poets? In addition to tanka what other genres of poetry do you write or read? Tell us about some of the books you've enjoyed. 

PKP: It is indeed difficult to filter out. Sanford Goldstein, Dennis M. Garrison, Marilyn Hazelton, Claire Everett, an’ya, Sonam Chhoki, Susan Constable, J Zimmerman, Patricia Prime, Susan Weaver, Chen-ou Liu, Geethanjali Rajan  are some of my vavourites. I do write both longer and shorter versions of poems. Often, I do some creative experiments with the short-form of Japanese poems. The hainka, a fusion of haiku and tanka, has been widely appreciated (Tanka Tuesday Poetry Challenge 12, Hainka 13 May 2025). Recently, the leading haibun writer, Colleen M. Farrelly, appreciated the new genre and published Hainka-Prose in various journals. Similarly,“Braided Haiku”, a new form (Frogpond,47:2, Spring/Summer 2024), finds its place in Heliosparrow Journal and is read in the prestigious “Rattlecast Poetry Series” by Biswajit Mishra, a Canadian poet. My latest collection, 'I Am a Woman,' is a fictional verse composed in tanka style and published in the UK.

Recently, I read some of the beautiful collections, namely “Last Train Home” edited by Jacqueline Pearce, “longing for sun longing for rain” by Geethanjali Rajan, “A Peacock’s Cry” by Neena Singh and “Dreaminations: Prose Poems by Jianqing Zheng.

About the poet:

Pravat Kumar Padhy, based in Bhubaneswar, India, obtained his Master of Science and a Ph.D from Indian Institute of Technology, ISM Dhanbad. He is a mainstream poet and a writer of Japanese short forms of poetry. His poem “How Beautiful” is included in the university-level undergraduate curriculum. He served as a panel judge of “The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Awards for Individual Poems” and haibun and haiga editor, ‘Under the Bashō. ’ His tanka appeared in the “Kudo Resource Guide” at the University of California, Berkeley, and was put to rendition in the Musical Drama Performance, “Coming Home,” at the International Opera through Art Songs in Toronto, Canada. He introduced new forms of poetry: Hainka: a fusion of haiku and tanka,  Braided Haiku and  Micro-Haiga (One-word Haiku). His essays on haiku and tanka are featured in Indian Literature, Frogpond, Presence, Drifting SandS Haibun, The Wise Owl and Juxtapositions (forthcoming).

He is one of the jury members of “Wind on the Cherry Blossoms Haiku Project,  “Associazione Culturale” Rami d'Oro, Italy ( 2026).

Your Challenge this Week:

From the poet's beautiful tanka - "on the edge/ of curled green leaf/ the burden of the heavy rains". What burdens do you carry, which ones you'd like to shed, which ones have made you, you? That's your inspiration/challenge for this week. Where would it take you, I wonder...

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.