.
Honorable Mention, Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational 2011
.
I feel a little guilty receiving an honor for a haiku about cherry blossoms, considering I’m not entirely sure I’ve ever actually seen a cherry blossom in real life.
Lots of pictures of cherry blossoms, of course. They certainly look pretty. But not, as far as I can see anyway, any prettier than apple blossoms, which my life has been full of, entwined with. We had a tiny apple orchard in the backyard of my childhood home, which I mooned around every spring, and now I live a couple of miles from a famous arboretum full of dozens of apple trees that bloom spectacularly every May and attract hordes of visitors, including, always, me. So when I write haiku about cherry blossoms, frankly, I’m usually thinking “apple blossoms.” Seeing apple blossoms, smelling apple blossoms. Wishing it were time for apple blossoms again.
Yeah. I don’t think I’ll write any more haiku about cherry blossoms. It’s not like I’m one of those sticklers who insists that every haiku must be a faithful record of some event the poet has actually experienced. But I don’t usually write haiku about things that I have absolutely no experience of and, really, absolutely no feeling for. And honestly, this one smells fake to me, a plasticky gimmicky haiku I stuck together for contest-entrance purposes out of convenient haiku parts I happened to have to hand. Adorable little baby fingers. Imaginary, unimaginable, legendary blossoms. Some kind of blissful, sentimental Madonna bearing no resemblance to the grouchy, sick pregnant woman that I actually was.
Of course, the great thing about haiku is that what seems meaningless and pointless to one person can seem entirely different to another person with another set of life experiences and another point of view. Maybe you’re one of those people and this haiku speaks to you. I’m very happy to have shared it with you, if that’s the case.
But I still think I’ll be avoiding writing cherry-blossom haiku in the future. Watch this space for apple blossoms next spring.
.
.T
Red Dragonfly 