Flowering Cherries

On this icy bank holiday Friday I decided  –  once the shopping was done and I’d stocked up, among other things, on my mango smoothie fix as well as prawns and veg for stir fry, fresh vanilla slices and a bottle of white bordeaux – to catch up on my botanic gardens journal. April was all about the flowering cherries and the unexpected snow, and somehow in the poems this got mixed up with mathematics and David Hilbert and the Gottingen school.The poems that began to form still need lots of work but now at least I’ve nailed them to the page and the work can begin. I’ve been thinking that writing poetry is not so very different from crime fiction – more of that next time…below are some journal pages

‘I want to do with you what Spring does with cherry trees.’ Pablo Neruda –

‘Break open a cherry tree and there are no flowers but the spring breeze brings forth myriad blosoms.’ Ikkyu Sojun

Before I started keeping this journal I wrote a short story Tokyo Dreaming inspired by the Japanese Cherries in the Botanic Gardens – Structo Literary Magazine will be publishing it soon!