TANKA TAKE HOME — 24th December '25 Featuring poet: Michele L. Harvey

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

24th December, 2025

poet of the month: Michele L. Harvey

she always said 

“stop by for a spell” 

the widow 

who collected cats 

and knew each herb by name

Published: Ribbons, Winter 2009

I understand 

the perfection 

of imperfection… 

I fold his favorite shirt 

carefully, stains and all 

Skylark, Winter 2015 

Michele, 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?

Michele: Early on, I belonged to multiple online forums run by established poets, but being a bit  of a hermit, I now rarely share work before submitting or publishing, unless doing collaborative work. The folk I hold as masters of the genre, have set a high bar for me to try and reach. They keep me humble & honest about my own work. Writing, like any art, is a journey and modern Tanka presents a wide open sky to write upon, ready to accept almost any subject. 

More about the poet:

Michele's career has been as a professional landscape artist, painting in both oil & watercolor since 1976, in New York, USA. 

Your Challenge this Week!

Finding spells in nature or looking for perfection in imperfections, we are seeking something all the time and these tanka by Michele remind us about that. What are you seeking? That's the challenge for this week. 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.