Early Spring is always an exciting time to look forward to, and this is a great poem for that time of year:

Japanese	Romanization	Translation
人はいさ	Hito wa isa	With people, well
心も知らず	Kokoro mo shirazu	you can never know their hearts;
ふるさとは	Furusato wa	but in my old village
花ぞむかしの	Hana zo mukashi no	the flowers brightly bloom with
香ににほひおいける	Ka ni nioi keru	the scent of the days of old.

The author, Ki no Tsurayuki (紀貫之, ? – 945), is among the primary composers of the official anthology, the Kokin Wakashū (古今和歌集), and the person who coined the Six Immortals of Poetry therein. He wrote the famous and fictional Tosa Diary, and is also the cousin of Ki no Tomonori who composed poem 33.

The Kokin Wakashu explains the background to this poem. Whenever Ki no Tsurayuki would make a pilgrimage to Hatsuse (初瀬, modern day Hasedera Temple in Nara), he would stay at a friend’s house along the way. After an extended absence, when Tsurayuki visited again, the owner sent this poem to him with a branch of plum blossoms attached. Mostow hints that in one interpretation, the owner might have been a woman who was sad that he hadn’t visited in a long time, though other interpretations imply the author was a man, and the meaning was more platonic.

Here the reference to “blossoms” is for plum blossoms in particular, called umé (梅). We’ve seen the popularity of plum blossoms over cherry blossoms (sakura 桜) in antiquity even as far back as the Manyoshu.