Waiting in a Snowy Wood

 Waiting in a Snowy Wood

Riding our bicycles
Through a fog-hushed snowy wood
A train horn echoes
We wait, the sound fills the air
Grinding down all around us

The above is a tanka, a Japanese form I’m revisiting after my class, The Road to Haiku. In a previous post  I outlined the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable scheme. Truthfully, anything can be a form see renga, sonnets villanelles, and the rondeau. Consistency is the secret sauce.

Regardless, the form forces us to search for different words instead of taking the first one that comes to mind, it forces us to pay attention to sound. With a specific word/syllable count we have to make choices—often for the stronger adjective, verb. It makes us slow down, dwell with the piece, ask ourselves, What exactly do I want to communicate? Emphasize the sensory.

The context or story behind the story is Jack, my 3-year-old grandson, and I like to ride our bikes in the woods near our house. He on a child’s balance bike and me on mine. Believe me, the kid can cruise downhill, reaching 12 miles an hour. The other day we were out when no other human wanted to be on the path—the weather was gray and drizzly, 4 o’clock in the afternoon, so the sun was about to go down. We were out in our weatherproofs, listening to the hush under low clouds when we heard the horn. It pierced the silence. Through leaf-bare trees we spied the tracks and waited, the sound growing louder, bearing down upon us like the Industrial Revolution. Gears grinding, steel on steel. One can imagine sparks, black smoke, molten metal.

The event overwhelmed us, and then passes. We continued our ride.