TANKA TAKE HOME — 27th August '25 Featuring poet: Michael Dylan Welch

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

August 27th, 2025

poet of the month: Michael Dylan Welch

Hand In Hand

September 11 began with a phone call at 6:58 a.m., California time, shaking me from sleep. It was a friend of my wife’s. “Turn on the news,” she said, not even asking to speak to Hiromi. “Why? What happened?” I asked, motioning for the remote. “Turn on the news,” she repeated, and told me what was unfolding on televisions around the world. It was 9:58 in New York City, and seven minutes later, the south tower of the World Trade Center and all the thousands of people in it would disintegrate into a catastrophic heap of pulverized dust.

the remote control

warm in my hand—

if only

it could also

change disbelief

I went to work late that day after lingering in front of the television for three hours. At work, the amount of email was eerily light, and the day passed quickly with pressured routine. Still, I checked the CNN Web site now and then for updates, sometimes other news sites, and kept seeing the same horrifying pictures.

spreadsheet crash . . .

as if nothing had happened,

the receptionist tells me

there are Krispy Kremes

to eat in the kitchen

I was working pretty much by myself all day and didn’t talk about the attack. I had a one-o’clock meeting, and no one brought up the day’s events, the meeting coldly efficient in its focus on company PR and tradeshows. No one said if he or she knew anyone in New York or at the Pentagon. No one said if they felt sad, angry, helpless, or violated. I didn’t say that earlier in the summer I myself had flown from Boston to San Francisco on American Airlines.

at the end of the day,

I clamber down a flight of stairs—

what is it like, I wonder,

to do this in smoke and dripping water

one hundred times?

When I arrived home from work, my wife was lying on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the news. Her office had been closed, and she had come home and spent the entire day watching television. “Not a single commercial today,” she said. I kissed her and asked if she wouldn’t mind driving to the beach to watch the sunset. I said I didn’t want to watch more news. I wanted to find some sort of relief. A few lines from a poem by Wendell Berry came to mind: “I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” She was hungry for dinner, and neither of us had eaten, but we took our jackets and walked to the garage.

the car shuddering

as the engine starts . . .

we both reach

to turn off

the radio

Moss Beach was about thirty minutes away, over the hill to the west. By the time we got there, it was growing dark. There would be no sunset because of fog, its white blanket hugging the coast. We walked down a short path from the parking lot to a viewpoint overlooking the waves, where, at low tide, a large reef of tide pools is exposed to seagulls and children. We stepped down through a few large rocks and onto the sand, small bits of driftwood and flotsam making a line just beyond the reach of the longest tongues of water.

We walked a quarter mile along the darkening sand. The tide seemed to be a little past high, and the receding water left the deserted beach nearly devoid of footprints. A vague glow from the west barely revealed the low layer of fog, and we could see out across the water only a few hundred yards. Waves sliced towards the beach, moody in their silvery, soothing repetition. They were not particularly large, the reef keeping them small, some waves revealing rock clusters in the troughs in front of them just before they curled over gracefully, smothering themselves, white in the lessening light, white to the ear.

my arms around her,

she holds her hands

against my chest . . .

wave after wave

beats upon the shore

As the muted daylight grew even darker, another couple appeared at the viewpoint behind us. Hand in hand, they stepped at the same time from a large rock, landing together on the hoary sand. Hiromi said that the waves looked like ghosts, dispelling onto the shore one by one by one. We didn’t stay long, as my wife felt a bit frightened by even gentle waves near dark, so we strode back to the path. We left behind a single car in the shadowy parking lot.

sweeping headlights—

out of sight

hidden by fog

the sun sets

on the day’s darkness

Back across the hill, we drove to a little burrito shop, and stood in line to order burritos. At the end of one wall, covered with a mural of a Mexican town square, a TV blared out the news in Spanish. As the line grew shorter, the news turned to the story of all the people who had jumped from the top of the World Trade Center to escape being burned. One after another after another, the TV showed clips of people jumping, arms flailing, bodies twisting and turning as they fell, so tiny against the never-ending wall of the massive building. But the wall did end, repeatedly, yet the cameras failed to capture the last moment of life in those swiftly falling bodies. One after another they fell, the terror described by the newscaster in Spanish. Without knowing what he was saying, I felt the cold rush of wind, imagined the dreadful panic of having to choose between death by fire and the exhilarating finality of leaping into the bottomless New York air. I remembered my one visit up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the amazing scale of its height above the street, above the city, above the world, and thought how deeply terrible it would be to fall from that pinnacle, the air squeezing tears from your eyes as you streaked to your death.

“Qué usted desea?” I was asked, also being nudged by my wife. I turned from my transfixed stare at the television to look at the girl behind the counter. “Sorry,” I said, and she smiled. It was such a brief and slightly tired smile, a nearly imperceptible upturn of the corners of her mouth, but it was enough to say she understood. In that moment I felt like I understood her, too, her there behind the counter, watching today’s news all day while she took orders for burritos and tostadas.

pen in hand,

she waits for my order:

a vegetarian burrito, please,

with no sour cream—

a death toll in Spanish

Driving the rest of the way home, traffic still seemed lighter than usual, the cars moving slower than they usually did, reminding me of the day the Gulf War started. I thought of the horrors of war I had heard from my parents and grandparents, in books I had read, in movies I had seen, all of it not really real, but I felt thoroughly grateful for the ocean I could listen to in peace through the sacrifice of others. I thought of the wanton disregard for human life that had brought unspeakable tragedy to the country on this appalling day. Then I thought of the couple whose picture I had not seen, but whose story I had heard, who had jumped together from the World Trade Center, falling to one death by escaping another, leaping together, hand in hand.

my wife reminds me

to keep my distance

from the car in front

her hand stays

upon my thigh

 First published in the Tanka Society of America’s TSA Newsletter 2:3, Autumn 2001. It is on the website at https://www.graceguts.com/haibun/hand-in-hand

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

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?

Michael: As I said before, I like to work out a poem in my head a great deal before writing it down. But I will trot out selected poems from my notebook for workshops. In fact, that’s usually the only time I will workshop a poem, because once a poem has made it to an index card, I’m less likely to revise it, or I just make such revisions on my own. But earlier on, I’m happy to hear how or if a poem works well. I also learn when to agree or disagree with certain suggestions. It’s an art to provide criticism but also an art to know how to receive it. In any case, what is a work in progress? In one sense, all my poems are always works in progress. If I ever think of a better way to refine a poem, even if published, I’m happy and eager to make that change. On the other hand, I think it’s vital to learn how to be your own editor, so you don’t share poems with others prematurely. Really knock it into shape yourself, why don’t you? Those with less experience might still need to learn how to do this well, but if you do your best, both pragmatically and intuitively (head and heart), you will save your readers some possible angst.

I’d like to close by quoting a poem by Naomi Beth Wakan (I recommend her book, The Way of Tanka). I don’t think she’s ever said this poem is a tanka, but its five lines still offer a valuable thought that I’m grateful to receive:

One does not write

because the goldfish play

at the bottom of the waterfall,

but because not everyone

can see them.

I have long remembered the first paragraph of William J. Higginson’s Haiku Handbook. There he says that the purpose of haiku is to share them—and thus to validate our shared human existence. I would say the same is true of tanka. In this way tanka is a social art, where each poem might find and even need resonance with another reader. We are each capable of pointing out distinctive and worthwhile observations in our poems that others might never otherwise see. And if others have seen them, how we describe them can still grant a unique perspective to a common experience. And as the unacknowledged legislators of the world, poets also have a duty to speak for others when it’s appropriate or necessary. This reality gives us the obligation to be ourselves, an obligation to share our precise uniqueness, and to truly notice the lives of others and ourselves. And if one of our poems connects with a reader (even if we might never know), then we have made our world at least slightly better.

More about the poet:

Michael Dylan Welch writes haiku, tanka, longer poetry, essays, reviews, and other content, and documents his writing life on his website, www.graceguts.com. This site includes a section on tanka at https://www.graceguts.com/tanka, featuring numerous poems and sequences, and essays on tanka. Michael founded the Tanka Society of America in 2000, and has organized all six of the society’s conferences, with a seventh one scheduled for San Francisco in September of 2025. With Emiko Miyashita, he translated the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, a thirteenth-century collection of waka poems (later known as tanka). In 2012, one of their translations from this book was featured on the back of 150 million U.S. postage stamps. Michael also cofounded the Haiku North America conference in 1991 and the American Haiku Archives in 1996, and founded the Seabeck Haiku Getaway in 2008 and National Haiku Writing Month (www.nahaiwrimo.com) in 2010. He also served two terms as poet laureate for Redmond, Washington, where he is president of the Redmond Association of Spokenword and curator (since 2006) of the monthly SoulFood Poetry Night reading series. Michael is originally from England and grew up there and in Ghana, Australia, and Canada, and has lived in Sammamish, Washington (near Seattle) since 2003. In 2023, he and his Japanese wife became U.S. citizens.

Your Challenge this Week:

Michael’s tanka-prose is heart-wrenching. His knack for detail is spot on, drawing us right into the narrator’s world after a horrific assault on humanity. Each tanka keeps the story moving. What stood out for you? We’d love to hear your thoughts. This week’s challenge is all about show, don’t tell. So show us! We’re so grateful to Michael for inspiring us this past month. Looking forward to this week's inspired poems from you. (Keep your tanka-prose under 250 words) Write on!

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.