THE other day, I was taken by friends on a circular walk along beautiful avenues of flowering cherry trees, their branches arching over us so that the profusion of delicate blossoms almost brushed our heads. When a gentle breeze stirred, white petals would lift and fall like little snow flurries. The trees themselves were very old, some so dark and gnarled and hollowed out by the years that it seemed a miracle that they still lived, let alone that they could greet the spring like this — that out of such an unpromising stock and stem, such finely wrought and fragile beauty could emerge.

But, if that was surprising, then so was my entire situation. I had flown out to the States to do some poetry readings at the Virginia Theological Seminary, not realising till I got there that it is situated just next to Washington, DC, and that I had arrived, happily, just in time for the Washington Cherry Blossom Festival. This is a time when people come from miles around to walk the shores of the tidal basin, beneath the hundreds of cherry trees, which were a gift from Japan more than a century ago, and have blossomed faithfully, as fresh as ever from their ageing stems, through all the dark vicissitudes, all the long struggles of the 20th and 21st centuries.

There was something telling and poignant about the context: through the branches that leant out over the water, I could gaze across at the Jefferson Memorial; and, when our walk round the shores eventually led us to that august and classical building, I could gaze across from its marble steps directly at the White House.

And all the time we walked through the blossoms, in beautiful scenes that could have come from some 19th-century Japanese print, the air above us was filled with the chopping, pounding sound of low-flying military helicopters, travelling in and out to the Capitol from the Pentagon and the military bases on the Potomac. One of these helicopters, flying low and fast, my host assured me, was Marine 1, bringing the President to a meeting in the White House.

Not even among these magical scatterings of blossom could we forget that the world is in crisis. And yet these trees had stood through so much, must remember so much, the two world wars come and gone, the political and cultural crises, rolling and roiling through the capital. They had blossomed on through it all. I thought of Basho’s famous verse:

How many, many things
They call to mind
These cherry-blossoms!

I thought, too, here in the centre of one of the great world powers, about power itself. The powerful helicopters, flying menacingly low, were one kind of power: power from above, power to dominate, the power that turns out sometimes to be no more than the power to destroy, a power that often destroys itself. And then I thought of the extraordinary hidden power, the flow and force of life itself, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as Dylan Thomas said. The gentle power that could still bring blossoms from a tree so old that its trunk was almost completely hollow, and its one stooping branch, held up with props, but still flowering in beauty one hundred years on.

I paused to pray beside that tree, and found myself remembering another tree, raised in darkness and despair 2000 years ago, from which blossomed a love and power that still transforms the world, still gives us hope.