Carpe Diem Tan Renga Challenge #97

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

Recently I decided to change something in the time of publishing of several of our special features. One of those changes was the decision to make a few features appear online on a bi-weekly base. One of those special features is Carpe Diem Tan Renga Challenge, which will be published on a bi-weekly base on Fridays. I thought ... "it's time to change the logo too". So from this week on I will use te above logo for the Tan Renga Challenge. I hope you all do like it.

Let me tell you in short what the goal is of this Tan Renga Challenge. Tan Renga is a short chained poem which has two stanza written by two poets. The goal of the Tan Renga Challenge is to write/compose the second stanza of two lines with approximately 7-7 syllables per line towards a given first stanza.
This week however I love to challenge you a little bit more. Instead of giving you the first stanza I will give you the second (two-lined) stanza and you have to write the first (three lined) stanza or hokku of this Tan Renga.

So here is our Tan Renga Challenge of this week:

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where the waters flow afar
the village glows with sweet plum flowers       (Shohaku)


This will not be an easy task I think. You have to fill in the "empty" lines (-----) with a haiku that could be the "predecessor" of the given two lined stanza. How can you do that? Well ... you have to associate on scenes/images in the given stanza to create the first stanza.

Credits: Plum Flowers

Here is my attempt:

in the twilight
as stars twinkle bright and clear
Honeysuckle perfume

© Chèvrefeuille

Hm ... I think this is a nice first stanza for this Tan Renga. Now let me re-produce the whole Tan Renga here:

in the twilight
as stars twinkle bright and clear
Honeysuckle perfume                      (Chèvrefeuille)

where the waters flow afar
the village glows with sweet plum flowers                (Shohaku)

As I re-read this Tan Renga than it's really a beauty (how immodest), but it wasn't for sure easy to think "backwards".

And now ... it's up to you to complete this Tan Renga in the "backwards way".

This episode is open for your submissions at noon (CET) and it will remain open until next Friday September 4th at noon (CET). Have fun! Break a leg!