NaPoWriMo day three. Today’s prompt was to go ahead and pen an epithalamium, but I just wasn’t up for the task, I’m afraid. Today was not a day for celebration. So I went and played with another form of poetry instead, the tanka, a traditional Japanese form that requires the poem to have 5 – non-rhyming – lines measuring 5-7-5-7-7 syllables. Here is my first attempt at such a thing (in my own interpretation of the original form, of course):
Inextinguishable
The fire was cackling
Greedily, watching his work.
Inextinguishable,
He climbed the slick walls with ease,
Pleased with the towers of smoke.
I have no idea where this poem came from, actually, but as I was writing it I was thinking of Stefan Grabiński‘s dark stories about the agency and sadism of fire.
Encyclopaedia Vanitatum 
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