Blogging a couple books was all well and good, but here was the real test. Could I follow in the footsteps of poets who found in these blossoms the ultimate expression of mono no aware?

Mono no aware is the sense of life's transience, the melancholy awareness that all things must pass. It's the feeling par excellence of traditional Japanese literature.

The pale pink flowers last only a week or so before they fall. As such they become poignant reminders that life is fleeting. By revealing the impermanence of the material world, the blossoms nudge us toward more spiritual pursuits.

At the very least, they're a great excuse for cute kimono and picnics.

I wanted to participate in the tradition in some small way. I wanted to write you a poem that shows that the classics are alive -- even if cherry blossoms appear so often that they can seem like a last-ditch effort to sound like a Real Poet. If the pen failed, I could allude oh-so-cleverly to a well-known poem, just like a courtier in a Heian story.

Naturally, I did it all wrong.

I showed up at stroller time on Saturday morning. There was just enough breeze for the SpongeBob and Spiderman kites, and plenty of sun for photo ops with the showier trees. A daredevil toddler was zigzagging through the crowd on a tricycle. He narrowly missed a lady in sweats who was reading a beach paperback and ignoring the trees altogether.

And I -- well, I tried to find the melancholy of it all. I skirted the trees where people queued up for family photos and took note of a fallen blossom, sneaker print and all. Finding a deserted field, I resolutely shot the dandelions and bare non-cherries.

My companion thought this was slightly insane (and pretentious, I'm sure). He dragged me past the port-a-pots to a nice grove.

"We have a picture just like that," he said, pointing across the Potomac.

I suddenly remembered a photo of my brother from a distant spring on the Mall. He lifts a squiggly curly-headed thing that I am told is me, age something-less-than-one. My dad has hair. Everyone smiles and the cherries bloom on.

It reminded me of that line of Keats:

More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd

The youths he describes in the famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" will always seem joyful and young -- naturally, since they're painted on an ancient vase. The sense of timelessness that impressed Keats is touched with melancholy when you consider old snapshots.

No doubt it's sentimental to imagine what the folks with the digicams will think of their images in twenty years' time, if they think of them at all. Even now, who knows what kinds of illness or abuse they know outside the frame.

Watching two girls jump to reach a branch, I didn't think of the Grecian Urn. I thought of Holden Caulfield's dream of standing in a field of rye with a catcher's mitt, waiting to catch the kids before they fell off the edge. (As if I could.)

My friend found me leaning against a tree, lost in thought. "Why are you looking down?"

I decided not to mention Keats. "Want lunch?" I asked instead.

And so the hanami ended over hero sandwiches and salted pretzels. For the art of flower-viewing has inspired, not just paintings and poems, but the handy proverb "hana yori dango": dumplings over flowers.

Powered by Japan Meteorological Agency.