“This poem came alive where it began in March of 2012 at the desk where I sometimes write. It was an accretion of sounds, feeling, imagination, random waves, memory, and thoughts from extensive readings in poetry, ecology, permaculture, and ecopoetics, that would, en masse, take almost a full year to resolve.
Those sounds are chiefly two: that distinct sound of warmer air newly mixing with the deaf, cold winter air arriving through bird calls which grow increasingly clearer, nearer as Spring [sic] is icumen in; and the sounds of bells — of the smallish, more intimate- sounding porcelain bells clustered like grapes in a tower; of metal bells, like brass, ringing ever outward — Spring’s own periodic table.
There was also a very fine color photograph that has stayed with me of a cherry tree overcrowded with flowers and young green pinnate leaves, and taken near the top of the tree and from beneath it as if the camera stood up in a treehouse among the boughs.”
earth day
the knell
of cherry blossoms
– Donna Fleischer
Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival Haiku Invitational 2013