Tankas, comparative winters, plant biology, and a tanka (in English)

Dammit, tankas are addicting!  I already wrote one about a squirrel in my garden this morning, while I was pouring my tea.  For anyone counting & keeping score, in England, squirrel is two syllables - squi and rel.  I have had problems with people in the US understanding the word, because they say it “squirl” in their local accent and couldn’t understand the two syllable version to be the same word.  Since syllable count is important for tankas, I just wanted to point that out, lest somebody nitpicks syllable count.

For anybody that doesn’t know, a tanka is a form of Japanese poetry & it is blank verse - it doesn’t have to rhyme.  It doesn’t even (in English) need to have a particular meter, no battling with iambic, or dactyl or trochee or any of the other patterns that we had to do for English homework back in the day - although I do still remember some phrases from when we were being taught linguistic tricks for emphasising your language, like alliteration - one of them is from A Tale of Two Cities, if I recall correctly, and the other is from Grendel - 

’Neath our feet broke the brittle bright stubble like glass

Rhym rhusan band  (rimefrost bound the earth, which is beautiful in either language). 

But back to the tankas.  I’m excellent at digressing, I could digress for England, if only it were an Olympic sport (I usually keep my digressions to footnotes, which themselves can have footnotes, but I’m trying to be more linear today for some reason).

A tanka is a poetry form that is based on line length - in English, it is 5-7-5-7-7 syllables.  The poem is divided into two parts, an upper and lower part - the 5-7-5 lines are the upper, and the last line of those is meant to give you the twist, preparing for the lower part ( the 7-7 last two lines) that brings it home.

So, this morning, I glanced out of my kitchen window as a I was pouring my tea.  It was a dull, grey day, that might still have been raining lightly.  It’s February, so the trees are all bare, and were darkened further by the rain.  The grass is a hardier variety than the ones I grew up with in England.  In England, the lawns are still green in the winter, it’s sometimes a muted green, a bit sad and worn, compared to the green they are in spring or summer, but still green. 

It’s a milder climate in England, despite the latitude, thanks to the Gulf Stream bringing warm water up across the Atlantic, and just to being on the ocean at all - it’s a Temperate Maritime Climate, rather than a Temperate Continental Climate, which doesn’t seem all that temperate at all when you have to live in it, given how hot the summers get, and how cold the winters are.

The US, of course, gets the continental one (small parts of it get the maritime one, and get the damp and the cooler summers and milder winters - I’m looking at you Seattle, with all your rain, and San Diego, where everyone needs winter coats if the temperature drops below 60F…).  I’m in Kansas, in the middle of that continent with its temperate (hah!) continental climate, so the grass needs to be hardier than English grass - more drought and heat resistant in the summer, and more cold resistant in the winter. 

Plants can photosynthesize at temperatures greater than or equal 6C (approximately 43 F), and with the milder UK winters, they can often grow (albeit slowly) during the winter, and its worth the energy to the plant to maintain and repair chlorophyll and chloroplasts even during the winter.  

Not so in the US, so the hardier grasses become dormant in the winter, turning dry and yellow or brown for the winter, depending on their variety.  They do something similar in the summer, when it becomes very hot and dry; at least they do if you don’t spend a small country’s GDP on sprinklers and water every summer.  As you can tell by that phrasing, our lawns spend quite a bit of time dry and brown and dead looking in the summer too… I think we’re the despair of our neighbours, who have lush green lawns and waste an awful lot of water on it.

I know water self-recycles, and people seem to think that it is an infinite resource, but a lot of places draw from aquifers for their water sources or supplement from them, and they do not fill up at the rate that we are drawing from them.  Using gallons of water on a lawn that will survive the summer quite handily without it, just looking less pretty, is ridiculous and a waste.

But all this information about climates, plant photosynthesis, and comparative grass colour through the seasons in Kansas and England, is merely to tell you that the garden was looking bleak, and cold, and bare with winter.  It was very monochromatic, so many varied shades of brown, between the bare earth, the tan and ochre yellows of the grasses (which fits so well with the kanji for yellow, must be similar grasses in China too), the rain-wet bark of the bare trees.  All the shades of brown, and a flat, grey sky above.

Then suddenly, there was a dart of movement that caught my eye and a small greyish brown creature appeared, echoing the colours around and above it.  It was so small from being rain sodden that I thought it might be a chipmunk, making one of its rare winter forays above ground, since it was warmer again yesterday.  But I realised that it was a squirrel, despite that, just beaten down by the weather, alternately pausing, and creeping along, and darting forward looking for food.

And this tanka formed in my head, full sprung, and I had to go and write it down, leaving my tea half poured, before I lost it. Tea has been safely drunk before typing this up, no one need worry about a tragedy of unpoured, or cold, tea.

After reading all that build up, I’m sure that the tanka won’t live up to it, because very few things could live up to an introduction that long and detailed, but here it is anyway… ;).

A sky-wet squirrel

Darts incautiously through rain,

Brings garden to life.

Brown grasses, bare bones of cold,

Mean nothing to life and spring.

Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash

Our backyard, now squirrel-less