The Tanka Society of America has examples of tanka poetry.
The tanka is a poem written in a single line.Tanka is a form of waka, Japanese song or verse, and is better known as a five-line, 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form.
Tanka was the preferred verse form in the Japanese Imperial Court, where nobles competed in tanka contests, but also for women and men engaged in courting.After an evening spent together, lovers would often dash off a tanka to give to the other the next morning as a gift of gratitude.
The tanka is similar to the sonnet in many ways.The tanka uses a turn known as a pivotal image, which marks the transition from examining an image to examining a personal response.The turn is located within the third line and connects the upper and lower poems.
Lady Akazone Emon, Yosano Akiko, and Lady Murasaki Shikibu are some of the great tanka poets.The tanka form has not been used in the same way by English-language writers as the haiku.
There are many excellent anthology of Japanese verse, most of which feature lengthy selections of tanka.The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani, is also considered a classics.