Writing It Down

This is Joan Zimmerman last year writing it down 

in the Tilden Botanical Gardens,

on our ginko there in 2014.

Our group went again this year, but I was still out of town.

Joan (with Patricia Machmiller)

gave the spectacular tanka workshop last Saturday.

Here is an example from the manual of 

almost inexhaustible resources

that she prepared for us.

Happiness is when

you struggle with a poem

for a hundred days

and then suddenly

it turns out just right

Tachibana Akemi

From the Country of Eight Islands;

an anthology of Japanese Poetry;

edited and translated by Hiroaki Sato

and Burton Watson, 

University of Washington Press, 1981, page 412.