It is hard, but it's the kind of brain-stretchy hard I really dig. And after translating almost 900 tanka from Japanese, these are is stretches in whole new directions.

I'm hopeful that, with more experience, so I can judge better what to balance, I make the form stricter in English. Especially making all poems of one meter into all one meter. (That turned out to be easier to pull off, coming from Japanese.) I'm beginning to get a hazy sense of when a poem is tighter/more dense than others, which is a start.

Thanks for the kind words.