Poetry

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep

When you awaken in morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circle flight
I am soft stars that shine at night
Don’t stand beside my grave and cry
I am not there. I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye

The Moth and the Butterfly

When the sun rises over the horizon,
the butterfly emerges to dance in its brilliant light.
It flickers its colorful wings with euphoria,
To celebrate all the beauty found
in the majestic garden of life.

When the moon arrives in the darkness,
The moth appears at the disappearance of sunlight.
It flickers its pale wings as it shakes from its deep slumber,
To go search for food
To carry it through the night.

The moth prefers the moon and detests the sun,
While the butterfly loves the sun and hides from the moon.
Every living creature responds to light,
But depending on the amount of light you have inside,
Determines which lamp in the sky
Your heart will swoon.

Suzy Kassem

Ninth of March

For some, life means a heartbeat,
Simply a muscle,
Nothing more.
Never comparing its rhythm to ancient drums.

For some, life means childhood.
A youthful phase.
Ending with certainty at eighteen years.
For others, life is matter.
A scientific feat.
No play-time or hurray-time,
No melodic beat.

For some, life begins at twenty, or forty, or seventy-three. An elevation on the
mountain that is life.
The backpack is heavy and the sun burns.
Each sweltering step higher, the load seems greater.
But cool air at this altitude refreshes.
Marvel the view.
Snowflakes melt on contact with heated skin. First cooling, then chilling.
Reach into the pack lying on the rocky peak. Retrieve a blanket then wrap it ‘round a shivering body.
Wonder at summer’s green and summer’s blue beneath.
Heart-pounding powerful sounds, reaching great distances, yet…gentle enough
to be a whisper.

For some, life is a single fragile heartbeat.
Long enough to make music.
Not long enough for lyrics.

Life need not be measured in time,
Only lived to the fullest.
Each day a gift.
For what is time? And what is life? And what is a lifetime?

A performance on a blue and green globe.
A park where we play with others,
Whereby we each carve our initials on the trunk of a massive oak,
Make our mark in little villages, shires, and continents.
With loving embraces,
With sincere acts of:
Welcoming babies,
And sorrowful goodbyes.
A condition of existence in which we search for the secrets of the universe,
Hoping, Believing, Knowing,
That the reveal will be beyond comprehension.
And in that, perhaps life, as we don’t know it, is eternal.

Marie Beswick-Arthur

Emerald Green

Emerald green is the color of life and of the springtime,
Conveying harmony, joie de vivre and most important, love
Emerald green retains its lively vigor all the time
In all nuances, like those wonderful green eyes that rove.

Sunlight dances across the Gulf of Mexico, a lovely place
With emerald green waters and very hot white sand.
Moreover, we see this green in a forest, a darker space,
Or we can see it in the green grass in the Spring land,

A metallic green body with small yellow sweet stripes
And emerald eyes have the Hine’s emerald dragonfly.
Nymphs hatch in marshes high in sedge meadows,
When sheds its skin and emerges an adult fly.

A mineral emerald green contains the Romanesque murals.
The old Masters used verdigris for them and copper green
To make a deep brown, mixed it with sulfur-containing colors,
Such as cadmium yellow, vermilion or blue-ultramarine.

The green we see in December represents the evergreen tree,
A symbol of life continuing even in that dark day.
We look to the pins and the rhododendrons and we agree
That greenery will return to the world again someday.

The green chosen for the color scheme of Christmas night
Is emerald green, that deep, pure, clear green inside
That seems to shine with light, in the season of white
When there isn’t much natural green available outside.

A very ambitious plant is hymenaea courbaril, the tree named Amber
It has the most attractive emerald-green heart shaped leaves.
Like Orchid Trees, so pleasing to the eye with their alluring shimmer.
Lycopersicon esculentum has emerald green tomatoes with dark green stripes.

With this emerald green Van Gogh wanted to paint plastic correctly
Maybe his eyes saw a special nuance, after cutting his ear
He worked all prima, onto the canvas painting directly
From his imagination and from reality, making the image believable.

Marieta Maglas

Oenone

For now the noonday quiet holds the hill:
The grasshopper is silent in the grass:
The lizard, with his shadow on the stone,
Rests like a shadow, and the winds are dead.
The purple flower droops: the golden bee
Is lily-cradled: I alone awake.
My eyes are full of tears, my heart of love,
My heart is breaking, and my eyes are dim,
And I am all aweary of my life.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (From Oenone)