What if we had another hour?

Behind the Heian Jingu shrine, cherry
blossoms weep into cloud-smudged 
ponds. A week early, a fortnight late — 
there might have been no pink 
canopy between silence and sky. 

Is transience, then, the final 
gauge of unbearable beauty? An 
extended longing, an occasional
alleviation. Like raindrops. Or love.

Dead flowers mix with the soil and
become other things: fruits, fragrant
flowers, a bird. Ephemeral things. 
When love runs out, it becomes a 
poem. A forever being. A trellis of 
quiet words peering into the water. 

Like tree rings, a poem cut open 
can tell you its age. Meaning grows 
inside it, in concentric circles. Each 
measuring the growing distance 
between poem and poet. Poet and 
love. What if we had another hour? 
Another month? Another way? 

The kurinji flower blooms once in 
twelve years in the Nilgiris, staining 
the low mountains blue. We are all
tethered to primal timetables: Spring. 
Morning. Eclipse. Tide. By the pond, 
the poem waits, watching another 
generation of golden koi swish
their tails as they swim, once more, 
through its metered shadow.

#Poetry

This poem goes back to a trip to Kyoto, many Aprils ago, when the cherry blossom were in bloom. It was written in April 2023 as part of my poetic memoir series.

The Kurinji flower (Strobilanthes kunthiana) is known to bloom once in twelve years in the Western Ghats in Southern India.