The Uncarved Blog

This poem was inspired by a tweet from @RobertYellin The art of making broken pottery more beautiful, kintsugi. pic.twitter.com/Q1ZLWzWQs

I replied @kenchawkin Wow! What a metaphor for turning obstacles into opportunities. Life’s lessons build character.

I thought about it and made it into a haiku, then a tanka, and sent it as another reply to his tweet.

I also thought it was appropriate for a piece of Japanese pottery to have inspired a poem in one of the forms of Japanese poetry. I don’t speak Japanese but am reading kintsukuroi as having five syllables.

Here is a link to Wikipedia explaining kintsugi or kintsukuroi. Read the explanation under the picture of the piece of pottery, then the poem.

kintsugi tanka

kintsukuroi
turning obstacles into
opportunities

life’s lessons build character
what was broken is now whole

Robert Yellin was featured on this blog before. See Takumi is not ‘lost in translation’ in this beautiful film about Japan’s diverse artisan tradition.

Speaking of cracked things, Leonard Cohen said there’s a crack in everything–how the light gets in. It came thru him & lit up a broken humanity.

Tags: "to repair with gold", artisan tradition, arts, broken pottery, building character, fixing broken pottery, Japanese Poetry, Japanese Pottery, kintsugi, kintsukuroi, Literature, making something broken more beautiful, metaphor for growth, Robert Yellin, tanka, Writing

This entry was posted on April 11, 2013 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Art, My poems, Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.