A Waka

[Lykren]

Time wreathes all the thick,
silent forests in strong light
and pale losses.
Inescapably, the moss
gathers and releases moons.

[virtuoso]

Also, time girdles the trees with tempered rings, and spades the forest floor with moss. How does the moss gather and release moons, figuratively speaking?

[blank|verse]

I had to check that a waka is basically a tanka, with the syllable count 7-7-5-7-7. To that extent, you might like to add another syllable to line 3, as ‘pale’ is monosyllabic.

However, you might also like to forget the syllable-counting, Lykren, and concentrate on the words, imagery and rhythm, as it seems there’s an imaginative idea here which is being smothered under the pressure of the form. (And while it’s good practice to write in form, if you feel the poem could be better by dropping formal constraints – metrical, syllabic or whatever – I would always advise someone to write the better poem.) But there’s some nice internal chiming of vowels and consonants – forests, strong, losses, moss, releases, moons – which helps the poem cohere phonologically.

I’m not so keen on ‘strong light’, which suggests strong sunlight and goes against the forest being ‘wreathed’, which suggests mist or fog. And even if the two coincided, the sunlight wouldn’t be ‘strong’ through the mist. Added to this the abstract ‘pale losses’, which I struggle to understand or visualise to be honest – and then how Time can wreathe the forests in it. I also wasn't too sure about the 'moss gathers and releases moons' image.

If you want to stick to the syllable count or not, the polysyllabic adverbial ‘inescapably’ feels wrong in the poem because it comes after so many mono- or disyllabic words, which establishes a strong (and fitting) rhythm; and because it’s a disjunct, which is a type of sentence adverbial used for personal comment, and therefore strikes a rather too subjective tone in a poem which is otherwise objective and would work better if it retained this tone throughout.

Keep writing.

[virtuoso]

Here is a suggestion. Time breathes through solid trunk rings/ Sinks into the fermented/ moss carpet, hurdles/ canopy into orbit/ with light cradles; darkness binds