I thought I had the perfect photo subject for this month’s purple theme in the Life in Color photo challenge, with this purple iris from my garden. It was difficult to get a decent shot with my phone camera. The sun was so bright that my screen looked black, and it was hard to tell what I was framing. After several attempts, I captured these two.
Yesterday, on a whim, I wrote a haiku about a tree on my street. After doing some reading on other Japanese poetry forms, I thought I’d try a tanka poem about my iris. A tanka poem has this pattern of syllables, 5/7/5/7/7.
Majestic and robed
in purple, the emperor
stands, dwarfed by his bright
entourage of attendants
brilliant in their regalia.
© 2021 Susan Joy Clark
We grow some Japanese varieties of iris, and it would be great to pair those with a Japanese poem, but they are not in bloom yet.