To Gilded-Green Solar Days
After Robert Frost
Solar's both green and gold, Sun light and heat for you to hold. Growing energy, dawn's flower, But only if we reclaim power. So we transform, root and leaf, As Eden rises in rage and grief Between dawn and dusk, a midway, To gilded-green solar days.
— Adam Powers
Sorry not sorry to be so basic, but Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay is one of those iconic poems I return to often. Like fun-sized (plant-based?) Halloween candy for the soul. This poem first found me when my Dad died and since then I return often, reflecting in grief. Why? It's giving cycles of life in color through:
the personification and gendering of Nature,
the short aphoristic phrases stuffed with symbolism
time passing through each line: dawning hours/days/seasons
the TENSIONs: Nature/Nothing, green/gold, subsides/stay, dawn/dusk
There is something to natural metaphors that thrill me — they're giving biomimicry. But of ideas. Making texts so universal, to me at least, they feel like a squirrel could read it and ID that same sensation of the shifting seasons revealing cycles of life and death (although… I know that's not how squirrel senses work, the ability to read aside, as I've been working my way through Ed Young's new book, An Immense World, and squirrel vision would likely be tinted a bit yellow due to the rods and cones in their eyes. A colorful tangent to say, I highly recommend the book).
The speaker in Frost's poem explains the nature of beauty through changes in seasons, it’s kind of as simple as that in some ways. But can be ready many others. I'm sure I'll write another variation that's more on the way Spring's gold is shifting in this fossil-fueled climate, but working in solar day-to-day, the green and gold of capitalism felt more top of mind. I think there's something very Now, very elite capture of movement visions, about what green and gold mean in a warming world.