Hello Wedesday Musers! I hope you enjoyed last week's prompt. A little bit of business first...The Sunday Muse and the Wednesday Muse are two separate muses. Cousins if you will. Related but with different parents. Sunday Muse does not post on Wednesday and Wednesday does not post on Sunday. Confusing? Oh my yes!
Let us get to this Wednesday Prompt. The Japanese love their cherry blossoms. It is A.Big.Thing to view the cherry blossoms. People take pictures, pose with the trees, have festivals and many times, have picnics beneath them.
There is even special food for the hanami. All themed in in colors of pink, white, and green! At night, there are lights in and on the trees as well. The Japanese consider the cherry blossoms as renewal and of death. The blooms las maybe a week and then they are gone. So quickly they die. The samurai also took the cherry blossom to be the symbol of their profession. Whey they lived they were beautiful and glorious but when they died, often by suicide, they were simply....gone. Spring flowers I think make us all feel the same. They are beautiful and glorious but when they are gone, they are gone.
At one corner of my house, there is a huge clump of white daffodils. The smell wafts across the yard, they are so fragrant. Many of us love all of the blooms of spring: the white pear trees, the golden forsythia, the fragrant hyacinths, the happy daffodils. But in another week, they will be gone. Poof! I want a poem from you all about viewing spring blossoms. Do you take a special trip to view the cherry blossoms near you? Do you have flowers in your yard that you pick and use to decorate your home? When I was a child, I lived in Durham NC and twice every spring, we always trooped to Sarah P. Duke Memorial gardens to view all the flowers in bloom. It was gorgeous! We had flowers all around our home as well. The blooms always made me skip in joy. How do the spring flowers make you feel? Happy? Sad? Do they bring back happy memories or do they make you grief because of sad memories?
I visited several Japan several times during hanami and went to various cities to view the cherry blossoms and to participate in the picnics and partying that went on. So much fun but underneath, the underlying sadness at their passing. Mono no aware - wistfulness or sadness at the passing of things.
One of the best poems written about cherry blossoms was this one by Ezra Pound:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Only two lines and yet it has all the elements of life, death, ghosts...Charon rowing people across the River Styx, faces appearing and reappearing, brevity of life...the description of the cherry blossom petals on a black bough is riveting. Pound was a proponent of imagist poetry. This is quite an image, is it not?
Write a poem about the flowers of spring and how they make you feel, memories. Write about enjoying them, waiting in anticipation for them, the last blooming daffodil of the season. Make your images vivid, not necessarily pretty and poetic. But above all, enjoy yourselves. Throw yourselves into flowers of spring.
There is even special food for the hanami. All themed in in colors of pink, white, and green! At night, there are lights in and on the trees as well. The Japanese consider the cherry blossoms as renewal and of death. The blooms las maybe a week and then they are gone. So quickly they die. The samurai also took the cherry blossom to be the symbol of their profession. Whey they lived they were beautiful and glorious but when they died, often by suicide, they were simply....gone. Spring flowers I think make us all feel the same. They are beautiful and glorious but when they are gone, they are gone.
At one corner of my house, there is a huge clump of white daffodils. The smell wafts across the yard, they are so fragrant. Many of us love all of the blooms of spring: the white pear trees, the golden forsythia, the fragrant hyacinths, the happy daffodils. But in another week, they will be gone. Poof! I want a poem from you all about viewing spring blossoms. Do you take a special trip to view the cherry blossoms near you? Do you have flowers in your yard that you pick and use to decorate your home? When I was a child, I lived in Durham NC and twice every spring, we always trooped to Sarah P. Duke Memorial gardens to view all the flowers in bloom. It was gorgeous! We had flowers all around our home as well. The blooms always made me skip in joy. How do the spring flowers make you feel? Happy? Sad? Do they bring back happy memories or do they make you grief because of sad memories?
I visited several Japan several times during hanami and went to various cities to view the cherry blossoms and to participate in the picnics and partying that went on. So much fun but underneath, the underlying sadness at their passing. Mono no aware - wistfulness or sadness at the passing of things.
One of the best poems written about cherry blossoms was this one by Ezra Pound:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Only two lines and yet it has all the elements of life, death, ghosts...Charon rowing people across the River Styx, faces appearing and reappearing, brevity of life...the description of the cherry blossom petals on a black bough is riveting. Pound was a proponent of imagist poetry. This is quite an image, is it not?
Write a poem about the flowers of spring and how they make you feel, memories. Write about enjoying them, waiting in anticipation for them, the last blooming daffodil of the season. Make your images vivid, not necessarily pretty and poetic. But above all, enjoy yourselves. Throw yourselves into flowers of spring.
A wonderful prompt Toni! A perfect time for Hanami! Love it!
ReplyDeleteI yam here, fren.
ReplyDeleteIn preparation but I have left something on account . . lol
ReplyDeleteThe second and third paragraphs of the prompt read like a poem. The images are so vivid...
ReplyDeleteHi Toni, at last a sensible response from me but the first was fun as well . . :)
ReplyDeleteHey ... I wrote the poem and then realize it loosely follows the rules... I'm off to see my daughters High School Musical and will most likely be back to visit all the other poems in the morning (maybe some tonight) ... Thank you for the prompt!
ReplyDelete