Poetry Friday: NPM 2022 - Day 22

Today's poem is written to the masthead of a newspaper published at the Naval Auxiliary Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida in August of 1945. My father's flight crew was pictured on the back page and honored as crew of the week. I was surprised that the name of the paper was the Privateer, knowing the history of the word and its connection to state-sanctioned piracy. That's where my poem went.

This poem is written as a tanka. A tanka is a 5-line poem with the syllable pattern 5-7-5-7-7. You can learn more about this form at The Tanka Journal.

You can see the paper in ins entirety below. Click on the images to enlarge them. (Fair warning, some of the articles are representative of the nationalism of the time and offer unflattering stereotypes of Japanese people.)

I hope you'll come back tomorrow and see what new inspiration I've found for a poem. Until then, you may want to read previous poems in this series. I'm also sharing these poems on my Instagram in case you want to see them all in one place. 

April 1 - Senryu to a photo of my grandmother as a child
April 2 - Haiku to my mother's recipe
April 3 - Dodoitsu to a war memento
April 4 - Choka to my mother's engagement announcement
April 5 - Gogyohka to the receipt for my mother's engagement ring
April 6 - Senryu to a student's drawing of my dad
April 7 - Tanka to a photo of my grandmother and her mother by a car
April 8 - Dodoitsu to a piece of V-mail from my great uncle 
April 9 - Senryu to a Christmas card from Paris during the war (1944)
April 10 - Somonka to a war letter to my father
April 11 - Dodoitsu to an early family portrait of my mother
April 12 - Senryu to a photo of WWII nose art 
April 13 - Senryu to a pair of postage stamps issued in 1934
April 14 - Somonka to a war letter to my father
April 15 - Senryu to a photo of my mother as a child 
April 16 - Senryu to an Easter card my grandmother sent my grandfather
April 17 - Senryu to an Easter card my grandfather sent my grandmother
April 18 - Tanka to a First Day Cover celebrating NATO's 10th anniversary (1959)
April 19 - Somonka to my grandparent's wedding photo 
April 20 - Dodoitsu to a list my grandfather made of the cars he owned 
April 21 - Haibun to a newspaper story about a car accident my father was in

Finally, I do hope you'll take some time to check out all the wonderful poetic things being shared and collected today by Margaret Simon at Reflections on the Teche. Happy poetry Friday friends.