Seven Tanka
he’s a beauty,
the great big spider
crawling the wall
above the rattle
of computer keys
*
spring has come,
the ants
carry it
into my kitchen
on their backs
*
at work
I find more wrappers
from stolen CDs
stuffed into
the Christian music racks
*
stepping
aboard the boat—
I have already
reached
my destination
*
looking up
in the parking lot,
the clamor
of twenty crows attacking
a red-tailed hawk
*
the stray cat
tells me about
Buddha
sitting in the shade
of a wild cherry tree
*
the bus stops
at the Wal-mart,
a man with
a briefcase gets off
and walks the other way
M. Kei is a tall ship sailor, poet, and author of Pirates of the Narrow Seas (fiction) and Slow Motion : The Log of a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack (poetry) This is his website: narrowseas.blogspot.co.uk/
“I suffer from a disease of the heart that can only be cured by the sea.”