Waiting for Peach Blossoms

sit in the doorway

peach trees foretelling their bloom

last year’s jam on toast

*

I wait for the peach trees to bloom.

The buds are swelled and fuzzy, a soft pale green.

The springtime color plays nicely off the red-tiled roof,

lining the artistically contorting branches.

*

The flowers break open from their swaddling,

not so delicate, blushing, and sweetly scented as the apple blossoms,

with their blurred and yielding petals.

Not so soft as the pink-white apricot, sparsely decorating the reaching branches before falling like rain across the garden.

Different yet again than the effusive plum flower

or the scent of white pear blossoms that so repelled me as a child.

Not like the showy pink of flowering cherry and double pendant heavily drooping almond.

*

A flower, hard, pink, and small,

unyielding, sharp-edged petals,

unremarkable for beauty, leaves out, practical.

An ugly duckling among flowers. A worker, not a dreamer.

*

Patiently wait for it, almost unnoticed, to show its intrinsic value,

in the transformation to late summer fruit,

round in the hand, dripping with juice,

peach yellow-orange flesh,

red stringy areas clinging slightly at the pits,

blush golden yellow and burnished red fuzz,

sometimes tinged green before ripely softening to the touch.

*

I imagine how it will be again,

the luscious fruit dropping with a dull thud to the ground

responding to a slight breeze,

the bees humming drowsily on the fallen fruit,

scent permeating the air in late August and early September

if the frost doesn’t return to kill the blossoms.

********************************************

Thank you for reading this poem, one of seventy-two celebrating a year of the traditional Japanese calendar micro-seasons.

Insects Awaken- keichitsu (啓蟄) is the third of six spring seasons in the calendar.

The three micro-seasons of keichitsu are:

March 6–10 Hibernating Insects Surface- sugomori mushito o hiraku (蟄虫啓戸)March 11–15 First Peach Blossoms- momo hajimete saku (桃始笑)Peaches are traditional symbols of long life and prosperity in many cultures. March 16–20 Caterpillars Become Butterflies- namushi chō to naru (菜虫化蝶)

To read more poems in this series, I invite you to follow the Micro-Season Poem Cycle on Medium with a subscription, where they were originally published by Thomas Gaudex in the publication Scribe.

Natalie