Two days of hanami in a row. I think my liver is failing.

Here's a poem by OKAMOTO Kanoko about sakura (from a whole big collection of them), translated fairly freely (and, perhaps appropriately given the freeness, kind of Jeffersonianly):

日の本の春のあめつち豪華なる桜花の層をうちに築きたり
Spring in the land of the rising sun
and Nature's God has given my garden
a glorious carpet of sakura petals

It is probably boorish of my to try to verbalise this, but I'm going to go for it anyway: for all I like to kid about the actual flowers being secondary to the drinking and companionship at hanami, the falling petals are crucial to creating the atmosphere. I think when the Sakura, Sakura song says 霞か雲か, "like a mist or like a cloud", what it is getting at is the extreme three-dimensionality of the event.

It's not just humans on the ground looking up at flowers on trees. Everything between the ground and the highest branches is one huge three-dimensional happening, given an identity distinct from the rest of the three-dimensional world by virtue of being full of cherry blossoms.

Miz Okamoto, your thoughts?

十年まへの狂院のさくら狂人のわれが見にける狂院のさくら
狂人のわれが見にける十年まへの真赤きさくら真黒きさくら
The sakura at the asylum ten years ago
The sakura at the asylum that I saw when I was crazy
Pure red sakura, pure black sakura

Decades ahead of The Sylvia, too.