R.K.Singh As A Haikuist And Tankaist Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

R.K.Singh keeps saying about
The haiku and the tanka
The Japanese formats and forms
And we keep hearing about
Without knowing Japan and the Japanese,
How th language,
The speech of,
The sound-pattern of the Japanese
Being recreated
In being syllabic, short and curtailed,
The haiku and the tanka
We reading them
Trying to be adept in rhetoric and scansion
And prosody,
Counting, adjusting and reading,
Dovetailing and making meaning from,
Looking up the words
In the dictionaries
To mean the haiku and the tanka.

A haikuman, a tankaman from India,
Not Japan
Is R.K.Singh,
Borrowing the idea from
And writing,
Following the British and American specialists
Of the nineteenth century,
Moving from the haiku to the tanka,
The tanka to the haiku,
A haikuman he,
A tankaman
Poet R.K.Singh
Presenting verses
As haikus and tankas
Written in India,
But waiting for a call from Japan
As a visiting fellow.