TANKA TAKE HOME — 1st 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!

1st April 2026

poet of the month: Pravat Kumar Padhy

sublime smiles 

the painting portrays  

I adjust to live 

rewinding the coil of time

in the shadows of my loneliness

Notes From the Gean, Vol 2 Issue 2, 2010 (Tanka Ed. H. Gene Murtha)

withered flowers

I gather with love and care

closing my eyes

in the garden of memories

I dream the greatness of living

Kokako 17 September 2012 (Eds. Patricia Prime and Joanna Preston)

Way to Classical

 There lies the pleasure of searching old books in the street shops for poetry lovers. More than three decades ago, while walking down the street of Dehradun on a winter morning, I picked up some rare and prized collections: The Major Metaphysical Poets, The Major Romantic Poets, The Major Victorian Poets, published by Washington Square Press, New York.

Today the withered, brown-tinted pages continue to emit the fragrance of freshness, and the writings unfold the ardent lyrical musicality and idyllic significance. My passion lingers on for collecting the pearls from the ocean of verses. I turn aside from my chair:  my daughter renders me a moon-smile scrolling on the Kindle edition of Modern English!

early summer

the wildflowers

I pick up

strewn along  

seldom trekked walkway

Valley Voices, The Literary Review, Mississippi Valley State University, Vol. 21, No.1 Spring 2021 (Ed. John Jheng)

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

Q1.

TTH: Do you come from a literary background? What writers did you enjoy reading as a child? Did you write as a child? 

PKP: I do not come from any literary background. My parents used to inspire me in my pursuits. As a child, I enjoyed the poems by Gangadhar Meher, who is revered as “Poet of Nature.” Later, I read beautiful poems by Jayanta Mahapatra, Kamala Das, Bibhu Padhi, Sitakanta Mahapatra and Niranjan Mohanty. I began composing proverbial poems (sort of Monostich) in my early teens, around thirteen or fourteen, while writing essays in my mother tongue, Odia, and I remembered that I had written a four-line poem in English. During my school days, I used to write essays on seasons, describing the beauty of nature. I wrote an essay on Mahatma Gandhi for an interschool competition in class VIII and won first prize. The essay is archived in the City Corporation office. 

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 - "I adjust to live/ rewinding the coil of time": 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.