Carpe Diem Tan Renga Challenge #44, Sho-u "spring in our country''

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

A new Tan Renga Challenge is on ... to challenge your senses and insights in the association on themes. As I have done this month with the Tan Renga Challenges I have another classical haiku-poet for you to write Tan Renga. This week I have chosen a haiku by Sho-u. As far as I know he wrote only two haiku and there is nothing else to tell about him ... I couldn't find anything about Sho-u ... The goal of the Tan Renga Challenge is to write a second stanza of two lines (7-7 syllables or less) towards the given haiku by association on the first stanza in this case the haiku by Sho-u.

mannaka ni  fuji sobietari  kuni no haru

in the centre,
mount Fuji towers up:
spring in our country

© Sho-u

Poetry, like charity, begins at home, and if we do not love that country in which we have seen, how shall we love that country which we have not seen? For various reasons, excellent patriotic poems are rare in the literature of every country. Every nation has its own peculiar love of country, inexpressible save obliquely as in the above verse. It cannot be explained and hardly be imagined by anyone unless born and bred in that country, imbibing in the most trivial affairs of daily life something which sees, for example, in Mount Fuji an embodiment of his most secret origins and aspirations.
The love of country here, that is identified with the springtime of that country, is rightly felt by Issa to be something of living value:

[...] ''A symbol endures, but everything beautiful vanishes with the life-pulsation of the man, the class, the people or race that feels it as a specific beauty in the general cosmic rhythm''. [...]

Credits: Mount Fuji

I have never been to Japan so I cannot feel the intensity of the Japanese living with their country, but as I look to my own country, than I can feel the same as is said in the haiku by Sho-u and in the words by Issa. So this Tan Renga, started by Sho-u, has to have a second stanza which is making that feeling of love for nature stronger ... So that will not be an easy task ...

in the centre
Mount Fuji towers up:
spring in our country                                (Sho-u)

a gathering of families
celebrates the cherry blossoms                 (Chèvrefeuille)

Awesome! I did succeed I think to make the Japanese love for their country even stronger and I even could share my love for the Cherry blossom in this second stanza. I celebrate the Japanese spring every year again in my own garden as my Sakura starts to bloom.

This Tan Renga Challenge is NOW OPEN for your submissions and will remain open until next Friday August 1st at noon (CET). Have fun!