TANKA TAKE HOME — 7th January '26 Featuring poet: Cherie Hunter Day

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

Introducing a new perspective to our  Wednesday Feature!

7th January, 2026

poet of the month: Cherie Hunter Day

limbs after leaf fall

we sort out solutions

to x and y

whole numbers

without any remainders

for Want (2017) Ornithopter Press

so few women

make careers in science

through a microscope

the beauty of an amoeba

as it changes shape

Tanka 2020, Red Moon Press (2020)

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

1.

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

Haiku found me when I was around nine years old. My mother inherited some of my great aunt’s books. Among them were The Writings of Lafcadio Hearn in 16 volumes (Houghton Mifflin, 1923) and The Four Seasons: Japanese Haiku Masters (The Peter Pauper Press, 1958.) My great aunt left her own haiku scribbled on scraps of paper and tucked under the front of the haiku book. I felt compelled to write my own haiku.

2.

TTH: How did you get started as a poet? What was it about tanka that inspired you to embrace this ancient form of poetry? In short, why do you keep writing tanka. In high school and college, I took classes on poetry to fulfill literature requirements. Some students took essay writing, I took poetry. My degree is in Biology. I wrote haiku for years and then in 1993 I started writing/publishing tanka. In the beginning I dedicated tanka to people that inspired me in my life—parents, friends, and acquaintances. Tanka fosters communication between people even if the expression is one-sided. I continue to write and publish tanka because it allows me to include a substantial emotional component in a very short poetry form.

More about the poet:

Cherie Hunter Day poet, editor, illustrator, graphic artist, and collagist. She began writing tanka in 1993 and her first tanka chapbook, Sun, Moon, Mother, Father was published in 1997. Her work has appeared in tanka anthologies such as Wind Five-Folded (1994), In a Ship’s Wake (2001), The Tanka Anthology (2003), Take Five: Best Contemporary Tanka, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, and Vol. 4 (2009 – 2012), Tanka 2020 (2020), and journals including: Five Lines Down, Tangled Hair, red lights, American Tanka, Ribbons, Skylark, Presence, and hedgerow. In 1999 her collection, Early Indigo won the Snapshot Press Tanka Collection Award and was published in 2000. A book of responsive tanka with David Rice, Kindle of Green, followed in 2008. In 2012 she won the Snapshot Press eChapbook Award for A Color for Leaving, which was released in 2017. Her most recent collection, A House Meant Only for Summer (2023), contains haibun and tanka prose. She lives in Auburn, New Hampshire with her husband and son.

Your Challenge this Week!

It's not often that you see science in tanka, and I have to say that I quite enjoyed it! The first tanka is brilliant in the way it compares the wholeness of a branch even after it has lost all its leaves to an equation, solving for whole numbers. The second one struck home- my life as a scientist and how much I loved (and still love) the beauty of biology....

Happy 2026! The new year has begun, and I invite you to write of science. Biology, chemistry, physics- your choice :).

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.