In April 2018 I wrote a blog post here about blossom viewing: 'last weekend at Kew Gardens the cherry trees were in full bloom. It prompted me to organise for last night a small blossom viewing gathering at our house (we actually have a crab apple tree, but it's a perfectly good stand-in).' We are holding another gathering tomorrow and this time I was inspired by the cherry trees in Regent's Park (see above). Im preparation I have been writing out some of my favourite translated Japanese blossom poems on cards decorated with fallen petals. For example, this one by Nōin (988-1050) in which the falling flowers suggest a mountain soundscape:
To a mountain villageat nightfall on a spring dayI came and saw this:blossoms scattering on echoesfrom the vespers bell.*
Kenneth Rexroth included a version in his One Hundred More Poems from the Japanese, translating the last lines as petals scattering 'at the boom of the evening temple bell' which suggests they are taking fright at the sudden sound in a quiet place.
One of the best sources for blossom poetry is Ki no Tsurayuki (872-945), a poet whose work I've discussed on this blog before. He too has one about arriving at night on a spring day and looking for lodging - when he sleeps the blossom continues to fall even in his dream. In another waka the 'wake of the breeze' scatters petals into wavelets that 'ripple out into the waterless sky.' And in another, the wind is not cold, but the scattering cherry blossoms still resemble a snow flurry. Rexroth's One Hundred More Poems has one in which the poet loses his way in the confusion of so many petals falling. And the Met has a Ki no Tsurayuki blossom poem written out in the 17th century on decorated paper:
The scent of blossomshas soaked ever deeperinto our robesas breezes come and goin the shade of the trees.
*Steven Carter (editor), Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 134. I try not to quote whole poems but others have done so already, so I've included it here.
