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.
A Sunset of the City
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.
It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.
It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.
Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.
Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.
Nutting Song
The November sun invites me,
And although the chill wind smites me,
I will wander to the woodland
Where the laden trees await;
And with loud and joyful singing
I will set the forest ringing,
As if I were king of Autumn,
And Dame Nature were my mate,--
While the squirrel in his gambols
Fearless round about me ambles,
As if he were bent on showing
In my kingdom he'd a share;
While my warm blood leaps and dashes,
And my eye with freedom flashes,
As my soul drinks deep and deeper
Of the magic in the air.
There's a pleasure found in nutting,
All life's cares and griefs outshutting,
That is fuller far and better
Than what prouder sports impart.
Who could help a carol trilling
As he sees the baskets filling?
Why, the flow of song keeps running
O'er the high walls of the heart
So when I am home returning,
When the sun is lowly burning,
I will once more wake the echoes
With a happy song of praise,--
For the golden sunlight blessing,
And the breezes' soft caressing,
And the precious boon of living
In the sweet November days.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)