Hurry. The Cherry Blooms, still, at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden - the
Sakura Matsuri is on this weekend to mark its end. Housman's poem captures the bittersweet experience of witnessing such extravagant but temporal beauty. Hard to describe the opposing sensations of melancholy and joy one feels, especially here at the BBG where they have the largest collection of flowering cherries outside Japan. So much color under its canopy and when the breeze picks up and the petals snow, time seems to stand still but of course you realize at the same instant its the very thing thats slipping surely away.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
A E Housman
High Resolution
Soundtrack: Garden Meeting from
Memoirs of a Geisha
