Escape and Inescapable Conflict

Escape. This is an essential theme for my tanka. Feelings of wanting to escape. What I am talking about here is different from feelings of wanting to run away when being chased. It refers to a state of mind in which one feels like a bird in a cage. A bird with its wings clipped lives a miserable existence, in that cage. What drives my tanka poetry is often the despair of no escape. At other times, I also feel hope that I might be able to escape. I constantly sway between hope and despair. Those must be my honest feelings. I was once told that I had at most ten years of vision remaining. But since then, it has been thirty-five years, and I have not lost my eyesight. I wanted to fulfill my life’s purpose in learning. For that reason, while I was trembling at the doctor’s prediction of my blindness, I came to America to study at a graduate school. America was never my “safe haven.” Instead, I felt safe in simply knowing that I had a homeland to return to: cherry blossoms bloom and fall in my memories. Snow also reminds me of my snowy hometown." cherry blossoms” and “snow” are themselves the origins of my tanka writing.