TANKA TAKE HOME — 8th 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!

8th April 2026

poet of the month: Pravat Kumar Padhy

blue moon

through the oncology window

twisting aside

I stare at the twinkling stars

to become one amongst all

Eucalypt, Issue 28, 2020 (Ed. Julie Thorndyke)

birds’ song 

fades away into thin forest

posters of darkened sky 

and sunken lakes

at the Anthropocene conference

Ribbons, Winter Issue, Vol. 19 No.1, 2023 (Ed. Susan Weaver)

wave after wave

on an incessant journey 

another sunset 

when I long to change the taste

of salt, the colour of the wind

Skylark 2:2 Winter Issue 2014 (Ed. Claire Everett)

One Man’s Maple Moon, 2017 (Ed. Chen-ou Liu)

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

Q2.

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. 

PKP: The observation of the outer world often creates a spontaneous vibration. I use to feel an inner spark when I see a common thing, which creates a totally different symbolic frame in my mind. Poems come to my mind like a fragrance to a flower. As an intermediate college student, I submitted some of my poems in Odia and one day, to my surprise, the editor posted them in the Hostel “Wall Magazine”. In 1980, I wrote an article for one of the leading literary Odia journals, “Manas,” titled “Ezra Pound ebon Tankara Kabita” (Ezra Pound and His Poems). In this article, I interpreted haiku-like short poems such as “The Encounter,” “The Tea Shop, “ALBA,” “Ite,” and others.

During the late seventies and the eighties, along with longer versions of poetry, I wrote many short poems of 3-6 lines. Looking back, I feel that some of my earlier short poems, in fact, were tanka-like (“As patches of cloud/Memory sails around/When I wish/To see/Those become tears in my eyes” (Memory, Poet, Vol. 27, No.12, 1986) though I was not aware of the genre. Dr. Hisashi Nakamura, President, Anglo-Japanese Tanka Society, UK published some of my tanka in 2009.

Tanka offers a poetic way for me to express human emotions in response to the beauty of nature. Perhaps in the subconscious mind, this influences my poetry, bestowing life to the object through lyrical touch.

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 - when I long to change the taste of salt,/the colour of the wind : That's your inspiration/challenge for this week. What do you want to change?

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.