Good morning! Squirrels chasing each other over the snow outside my window. Ohhhhh, it’s getting to be that season, which means spring is inching ever closer...
I loved reading your Tanka. The third was my favorite - not because you fell in the cold mud, but because I could hear and feel more of your experience there. Wonderful.
I’m not really a veteran. I agree that I like the chance to write something outside my comfortable space, or to try something new. @Valkyrie is right. One should just try it and see where one is taken.
The baggage section has quintupled.... This line resonates especially with me. Your reflection on what we carry, and how much, makes a powerful statement. Can these things slide away, and allow us to travel the remaining road without their weight on our shoulders? Your hope is mine, too.
You bring the afterlife into bright relief. It’s almost the beginning of a joke: two guardian angels walk into a bar... Does Diego have a thing for Death? Or Death for him? I can’t even imagine how that would work. Great chapter.
This is beautiful on several levels. You describe a marvelous summer night, and you are alive to everything in it. At the same time, your observation but i know it isn’t forever can let the reader pivot to metaphor. The night is the absence of the beloved, perhaps - and what then is the silence? You’ll have me thinking for a while...