cherry blossoms

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

About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow. A. E. Housman

“In the cherry blossom's shade
there's no such thing
as a stranger.”
― Kobayashi Issa

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

“I never see that prettiest thing - / A cherry bough gone white with Spring - / But what I think, 'How gay 'twould be / To hang me from a flowering tree." Dorothy Parker 

“In the city fields
Contemplating cherry-trees...
Strangers are like friends”
― Issa

“So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition.”

- William Shakespeare 

I want to do to you what spring does with the cherry trees. Pablo Neruda

"Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?  To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving.  Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration."

-  Yoshida Kenko   

"How many million Aprils came

before I ever knew

how white a cherry bough could be,

a bed of squills, how blue

And many a dancing April

when life is done with me,

will lift the blue flame of the flower

and the white flame of the tree

Oh burn me with your beauty then,

oh hurt me tree and flower,

lest in the end death try to take

even this glistening hour..."

- Sara Teasdale,