Spring Renaissance

"My heart that was rapt away by the wild cherry blossoms - will it return to my body when they scatter?" ~ Kotomichi

"Spring? And now?", will be probably your first question. I know it is quite late into the year for celebrating cherry blossoms, particularly when the leaves are about to turn and set the earth's canvas ablaze in fiery, feisty hues. But what the heck, there's no time for spring! We carry it in our hearts all the time, don't we? When happiness is perched on green leafy branches, oozing with the fragrance of love and joy... When long forgotten emotions waltz through the air and bring back a basket of ethereal moments... When that sudden realization of being alive stirs up a little throbbing storm inside... When dormant hopes rise up from their dank beds to bathe you in sunshine and desire...

So, disobeying chronology and upsetting nature's scrapbook, I thought of talking cherry blossoms today. Cherry blossoms and their revival in me.

Back in the real spring, I had come across an achingly beautiful quote by the eighteenth century Japanese author Kotomichi, which I had fallen in love with the moment I had read it. How it couldn't make its way into this blog I do not remember, for it had touched me a great deal. The coming together of the fairy-like delicate cherry blossoms and the transience of human happiness in the lines is beyond poignancy. And so I want to preserve it somewhere here, which has become a sketchy memoir of sorts. This further led me meandering to one of the most popular and oft cited poems of Modern American Literature - In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound. Taking birth from intense emotions and composed of a handful of just fourteen words, the poem is Imagism at its best. To do justice to the renewal of spring, I married off these beautiful lines with some photos that I had clicked earlier this spring. And what gorgeous couples they make!

"The apparitions of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough."

~ Ezra Pound

Flashback II

Remember the moon that night?

Burning with all its might and beauty,

with a strange neighbourly expression.

Like she was your confidante,

who could peep into your heart anytime

and play that nostalgic game of hide-n-seek.

I could never fathom these smirks and hushed exchanges.

They were cryptic, probably hieroglyphic.

To be so unmindful and foolish,

when the air was swollen with prophecies,

like the proverbial lull before the storm.

And I oblivious of the lurking fate,

marveled at the swaying gulmohars

and the pristine, ethereal moon!

The moon...ha!

Where was my insight?

My sixth sense, which I was once so proud of?

Where was my heart...

Surely I had it tucked in somewhere safe,

and not just strewn morsels of it on the deserted road

to be trampled on by known and unknown prejudices.

Sure, there it was.

Flashback

There was once a heart inside me.

I remember swallowing it on a cold, rainy day

For warmth to feel snug and protected,

For a demon-fire to burn the wishful desires.

It was a Saturday I think.

A weekend for a perfect end

of Hope and a heap of other useless abstract nouns.

The fire remained, but only for a while.

Since then it has been dark and cold there.

A lump, perhaps of flesh, still beats feebly...

In its own mad rhythm, which I fail to understand.

Anyway, I never understood much.