Runaway Son

One dreary autumn morning I went to the YMCA for my twice-weekly exercise. There staring at me from the door was a big poster with a boy's picture. It is a wanted sign with the parents offering a monetary reward for the safe return of their 14-year old runaway son.

I was so touched by this sad incident which kept haunting me that later that day, while waiting for lunch at my favorite eatery, I wrote these poems at the back of the sales receipt. This is an example of a poem that wrote itself.

First I tried a haiku:

a broken bat lies
in his near empty room
their runaway son

but I needed to expand it a little bit more, so I wrote a tanka:

autumn chill
a broken bat
and busted ball crowd
his near empty room
their runaway son