When cleaning house recently, I came across a paper on which I’d written three Tanka poems during a visit to the Getty Villa. It would seem, however, that I never actually published them—so here you are:

I

Faces from the past
Captured in the hardened stone
Men of wealth or fame;
In their time were judged to be
Worthy of an artist’s work.

II

A splendid villa
Buried in a tragic death
Back in ancient days;
Resurrected in our time
Shares its beauty once again.

III

On an ancient cup
A boy reading from a book
Quietly intense;
Fragments show that even then
People did the things we do.

© MMXV Douglas P. Kendrick, all rights reserved.