A while back, I heard about something called boketto. Boketto is a Japanese word that really doesn’t translate into English very well. But, the concept of Boketto is akin to staring at the sky or into the distance without a thought… Getting lost in one’s own self; removing the self from a place mentally. There is no regard to the past and no connection to the future. There is only THIS moment.
From this thought I’ve experimented with incorporating boketto into a poetic form and thus the Boketto was born. The Boketto can be a very personal poem, or can be one of a random observation.
The Boketto consists of two stanzas, One of five lines (30 syllables – 7,7,7,4,5) and a three line (17 syllables – two seven syllable lines and a three syllable line which becomes a refrain if a string of Boketto are written). It expresses a single moment in time!
A variation of the Boketto makes use of two (three) ancient Japanese forms, the Tanka and the Haiku (or Senryu). The moment of which you write will determine the choice. (Haiku – nature; Senryu – everything else).
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WALT’S BOKETTO:
FIND MY PEACE
A cacophony of sound
surrounds this place, surrounds me.
there is no escaping it.
I cannot think
with this distraction.
But as the silence arrives
I wrap it around myself,
find my peace.
© Walter J Wojtanik – 2019
POETIC BLOOMINGS 