For Sarah’s prompt at dVerse: Harbingers. During the olden days in Japan and today actually, cherry blossoms are important. They are signs of beauty in the spring but they are also part of death. A tree will be full of the blooms and a week later, all the blooms will have fallen to their death – cherry blossom rain.
Harbingers
“As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly; you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life …-leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks–on your body or on your heart–are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” Anthony Bourdain
An owl ghosting through the darkness,
A hawk sailing on the thermals.
A small cat giving birth for the first time
In the freezing rain,
My mother holding up her hand,
Reaching for her long dead mother
That only she can see.
Harbingers of death –
It comes for us all
Sure as the cherry blossoms in spring.
kanzen sakura 
Jan 29, 2019 @ 21:56:01
It’s as simple and poetic as that – beautifully written.
Jan 29, 2019 @ 21:57:28
Thank you V, J.
Jan 29, 2019 @ 21:57:56
You’re welcome.
Jan 29, 2019 @ 22:12:53
This was beautiful. And I hope your mothers mother is really there to take her hand when she goes. thank you.
Jan 29, 2019 @ 22:19:55
Thank you. My mother has already passed but I believe those she loved who has gone before led her home.
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Jan 30, 2019 @ 01:49:34
I love any reference to cherry blossoms. This is lovely.
Jan 30, 2019 @ 03:04:41
I love your beautiful list of harbingers, Toni, and the cherry blossoms remind us that spring always comes around.
Jan 30, 2019 @ 05:28:58
Oh, that’s beautiful. From the symbolic to the absolutely real experience, from wider nature right down to your mother’s bedside. I’m tingling.
Jan 30, 2019 @ 07:29:17
Beautifully written, and such vivid images.
It’s funny we wrote different versions of sort of the same thing.
Jan 30, 2019 @ 11:09:01
Yes, the cherry blossoms, beautiful in their message. Life is short, however long it may seem, it is short. It is all over in a blink, the cherry blossoms, fall to earth. Beautiful poem.
Jan 30, 2019 @ 13:00:43
Nice lines: “My mother holding up her hand,
Reaching for her long dead mother
That only she can see”
Jan 30, 2019 @ 13:26:22
Oh Toni….I wish that you could be sitting here with me so you could have heard my huge sighing ohhhhhhh as I finished reading this. I was most touched by your mother holding out her hand….I know how you helped her in her final journey. And I am recalling our last May, living for the month in a rental with two huge cherry trees in the back yard. When there was a breeze, there was the most beautiful delicate cherry blossom rain. I took videos I was so smitten. I love your poem here. It is truly beautiful.
Jan 30, 2019 @ 13:53:28
Somehow every day is a harbinger of death as it brings us ever closer… and your examples are that also death can come in beauty… but it’s the pain that scares us more than the passing I think.
Jan 31, 2019 @ 00:35:40
Very engaging write Toni, visiter from beyond…
Jan 31, 2019 @ 09:36:50
cherry blossoms have been on my mind since i saw their bare branches in DC recently, there’s beauty in all life’s cycles, and yes some can be painful and yet the most stunning of all
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:02:07
Like an armor-piercing arrow. Succinct and powerful. The bird imagery highlights that quickness, suddenness that death strikes at us. This time, it strikes at us, but not yet us.
Bourdain`s quote also hits home in many ways. Losing him, as well as Chris Cornell, to suicide, both which still feel like they happened just recently, touch a sympathetic nerve that is all too raw.
A wonderful read, and thank you for pointing me toward it. Your words always resonate in my bosom.
Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:06:33
Bless you friend Tony was a friend. We had similar experiences when we were young chefs. His heart was broken. No reason to kill oneself but still. I miss him dreadfully.
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Jan 31, 2019 @ 22:08:16
I miss you Aaron. Take care of yourself. Tony and my mother’s deaths so close to each other were almost more than I could bear.
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Feb 01, 2019 @ 01:06:21
So you knew him… Ever since I saw his show, A Cook`s Tour, on Food Network I identified with him. From the Jon Spencer Blue`s Explosion theme songs, visiting Tokyo… just everything seemed to jive. All the hugs my dear friend.