A beautiful heartfelt write and presentation. Good brevity. A skillfully crafted Tanka; perfect form. Flow is good as is the line to line transition and breaks. Very nice rhythm. Deep expression of emotion. Good word choice. Good alliteration with nice assonance and consonance. Well penned and a much enjoyed read. Write on.
So lovely Stella. I've been trying to understand this style of poetry. I've found a couple of different takes on it, so a little confusing (to me), but this is wonderful!
sometimes it's difficult to be a purist, especially with Japanese forms Colleen , so i would advise you to stick to the 57577 form which most English speaking poets use