Tanka · Love
The Cedar Box
folding your letters
into the cedar box, I
keep what keeps, and still
the truest lines you wrote me
are folded into my days
Original poem © QuillOak — personal sharing is permitted.
“The Cedar Box” by The QuillOak Editors — quilloak.com/poems/the-cedar-box-tanka
Quick facts
- Poem
- The Cedar Box
- Poet
- The QuillOak Editors
- Length
- 5 lines
- Form
- Tanka, Short Poems
- Themes
- Love, Missing You, Short
Craft notes
How this poem works
Measured from the text on this page, not copied from a summary. Counts are approximate: syllables and rhymes come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which models General American English, so dialect, older pronunciation, and performance can all change what you hear.
- Shape
- 5 lines · one 5-line stanza
- End rhyme
- No regular perfect end rhyme. The poem may still be using slant rhyme, assonance, or internal echo, which this check does not score.
- Line length
- Lines run 5-7 syllables (median 6), consistent with trimeter. No single length dominates, which is normal once elision and contraction are in play.
Want the rules this form is measured against? Read what makes a tanka, or run your own draft through the form checker to see the same measurements on your lines. How we measure · Report a mistake
Text, source & rights
A traceable edition
Original QuillOak text. Personal sharing is permitted; other reuse requires permission.
- Author record
- The QuillOak Editorstoday
- Source record
- QuillOak originalThe Cedar Box, authored for QuillOak by The Quillery
- Display decision
- Full text · United States · reviewed 2026-07-18
- Publication record
- Not recorded in the imported source
- Text fingerprint
- SHA-256 a9c42ee5d526278d…
- Editorial handling
- Whitespace and stanza breaks normalized for web display; no material wording change recorded.
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