TANKA TAKE HOME — 22nd October '25 Featuring poet: Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

October 22nd, 2025

poet of the month: Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton

family photo:

my father’s father

before the booze

before the house was lost

before we inherited fear

Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Volume 4

speaking

of your courage and kindness

13 years later

your brother brings you

home again

Beyond the Grave, Robert Epstein, editor

this wisteria

so greedy for life

clawing air

as if to heave itself

toward heaven

Tanka Society of America

Member's Anthology 2015

learning 

to let go of pain

I hear

cicadas sing

of their love for autumn

Tanka Society of America

Member's Anthology 2015

Marilyn, we thank you warmly for sharing your poems and for your thoughtful responses to our questions.

Q6.

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? 

Marilyn: I have belonged to several writing groups for many years.  And I appreciate receiving suggestions on my tanka that I bring to the groups. At times the advice is to keep working with a draft.  Sometimes I agree with the advice, other times I may not agree but, I always say "Thank you."  And I consider the advice with an open mind the next day or even longer down the road.

More about the poet:

Marilyn Shoemaker Hazelton is a poet and essayist. Living in diverse parts of the United States as well as Thailand, Hong Kong, Spain and France has sharpened her sense of the need for poetry in this world. As a teaching artist, she approaches poetry as a path for empathy, understanding, and awareness. As a veteran of the War in Southeast Asia, survivor of an abusive first marriage, and a bereaved parent, she believes that creative acts can lift us from despair. 

Currently, Marilyn lives and works in Allentown, Pennsylvania with her husband of fifty years and two cats. Until recently, she was the editor and publisher of red lights, an international tanka journal. Her writing has appeared in Haiku, moonbathing, Skylark, Bright Stars, Take Five (volumes 2,3 4), The Sacred in Contemporary Haiku, Beyond the Grave, The Tanka Journal and tinywords. 

Your Challenge this Week:

Marilyn's poems are about life — the carrying on even after death, the craving to cling on to it, the accepting and letting go of pain in order to live. We'd love to know your thoughts on them. This week's challenge is about acceptance — whatever that means to you. Write. Read. Enjoy!

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 these themes, too.

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.