The Value of Cherry Blossoms

What is the value of blossoming cherries in our lives? We appreciate their fleeting beauty and recognize how they represent the ephemeral moment of our human existence. The birth of spring shown in the budding and falling of cherry petals also reminds us that seasonal change is reliable. In this way, cherry blossoms serve as a metaphor for change amid constancy. The poems in this book begin from this foundation but also make cherry blossoms personal, sharing often intimate stories of what it means to experience these blossoms—pinking the sky above our heads or fluttering in the breeze. These poems tell a thousand stories of delight in how we can appreciate spring.

花の陰 赤の他人は なかりけり

in the shade of cherry blossoms

there is no such thing

as a stranger

—Kobayashi Issa

The Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival began in 2006. Festival founder Linda Poole wanted to commemorate the region’s ornamental cherry trees with city-wide celebrations, recognizing that many of Vancouver’s beloved cherries were initially gifts from Japan in 1925. And so began the festival’s connection with Japan, even while embracing and connecting with the distinctive and diverse cultures of British Columbia. The festival has provided botanical education through tree talks and walks, and has held photography contests, musical and performance events, pop-up neighbourhood block parties, a Big Sing community chorus, flash-mob umbrella dances, picnic petal mats, and other events such as Bike the Blossoms and Haiku Exhibition art installations by indigenous artists. The Big Picnic at David Lam Park and the Sakura Days Japan Fair at VanDusen Botanical Garden anchor the festival, and the VCBF website provides ways to discover the blossoms with maps, informative news, and a history of cherry trees in Vancouver.

cherry petals on the mat . . .

the shape of welcome

still visible

—Michael Dylan Welch

As an extension of the connection between Vancouver’s cherry trees and Japan, and the Japanese tradition of hanami, or cherry blossom viewing, it was also Linda’s idea to start a haiku contest. This was a welcoming way to engage the public in appreciating cherry blossoms. That’s where I came in, to help establish and judge the first contest, called the Haiku Invitational, inviting everyone inclusively. Over twenty years now, many other judges have helped in selecting haiku, and VCBF has attracted tens of thousands of poems from around the world, celebrating submissions in categories for Vancouver, British Columbia, the rest of Canada, the United States, the rest of the world, and for children under the age of 18. To encourage the writing of haiku, the festival also recognizes thousands of additional poems as Sakura Awards and Honourable Mentions, and more recent years have also included interviews with the top winners and annual videos featuring their poems. Judges have been a who’s who of leading haiku poets and translators of English-language haiku, which for decades has emerged as a worldwide literary art that leans on yet is liberated from its origin in Japan.

cherry petals

a child adds a handful

to the busker’s cap

—Christopher Herold

Poet John Brehm once said that cherry petals are “a true poetic currency”—like a handful of petals in a busker’s cap. They have value in our lives, as do haiku, for their aesthetic beauty and their representation of life’s ephemerality. And so we celebrate them in this collection. We’ve arranged this book in chapters that feature the top winners from twenty years of the Haiku Invitational, with exquisite graphic design by Anne Dunnett. We list the poet’s location at the time of each contest, as well as the names of judges—and we also include a section of cherry blossom poems by all our many judges. Ultimately, we hope this book adds to the celebration of cherry blossoms in Vancouver, but also for others across Canada and around the world. In the spirit of the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival’s Haiku Invitational, we invite you to enjoy this book’s poems and to write haiku of your own. And above all, we invite you to celebrate the cherry blossom season each spring with your own dances amid the blossoms, as you join the blossoms in the breeze.

Michael Dylan Welch, Editor