A dawn walk with my friend Jess brought a hoped for sherbet sky to punctuate days of steely grey: a striated wash of ultraviolet, lavender and lemon brightening to candy hues of pink, orange and pure gold as the sun finally came over the horizon and touched a rising layer of fluffy clouds.
Getting up at 6.30am to meet in time to greet the day felt really hard after a night of broken sleep; almost as hard as getting up to the Flower Market – a 4am meet that Jess and I last managed to pull off between the last two lockdowns in the name of festive wreath making (much harder to get up during Covid times) – but equally worth setting the alarm for. Both bring back now distant memories of getting up at crazy hours to catch the cheapest red eye flight out of Stanstead or Gatwick airport to visit faraway friends.
Feeling a lot of wanderlust right now but also thinking about all the people who are getting up at this hour to go to work: on wards, in supermarkets, on buses and on building sites. I often watch the news while I write (a terrible habit, the only time I can watch it away from the kids or something that occupies another part of my brain?) so the reality Covid is never far from my mind. Still, the streets were eerily empty when I set off this morn.
Back to the sky, it reminded me of Robert Frost’s beautiful poem Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923) and the metaphorical perfection of its first line: ‘Nature’s first green is gold’.
I loved the poem as a child, first coming across it at about the same age as Syl is now (10) after watching and then reading cult classic The Outsiders with my older sister Anjali. It’s one of those short but perfect compositions that makes me happy and sad all at the same time; a bit like sherbet sunrises and sunsets in Covid time.
For those that don’t have the heart-wrenching memory of Ponyboy reciting Robert Frost’s words to his friend Johnny as they’re trapped in the church (further triggered by Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack piece Stay Gold with which the opening credits of the film begin) or don’t know the poem, here it is.
Like Amanda Gorman’s beautifully poignant poem The Hills We Climb, spoken at the US presidential inauguration yesterday, it’s one worth holding in your heart right now.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost
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.
First published in the Yale Review (October 1923) and then in the collection New Hampshire (1923), which earned Robert Frost the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The poem has been in the public domain since 2019.