Haiku for the week

Twenty years ago

Spring's sunshine was very bright

When my father died.

In fact, I think the end of April and the beginning of May had become established as the worst period of the year for my depressions before this, some weird glitch in my personal biochemistry reacting negatively to the increased sunlight - or perhaps a sense that Nature's exuberant fecundity at this season is mocking my perpetual romantic hopelessness. But my father's sudden demise in '92 hit me really hard; and while the sharpness of the grief has faded, the recollection of it taunts me more strongly each year with the horror of my own mortality.

Not even the sunny weather can lift my gloom. We had an utterly dazzling spring in Oxford that year; blue sky days now tend to bring on uncomfortably intense emotional flashbacks.