The fallen

Sayonara, cherry blossoms. In wet, cold weather I walked, almost alone, across the pink carpet late on Sunday, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

A woman in a red jacket walked ahead of me. When she turned around, alone under her umbrella, she was smiling.

Petals collected in drifts and sluiced into gutters, to float beneath the streets of Brooklyn, and out to sea.

Perhaps they collect in that famous and growing flotilla of ocean trash that sits somewhere, far from our eyes, and turn it, briefly,  pink.