It's National Poetry Month again!

I'll be posting a fair amount of poetry this month, beginning with "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs 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.

Already, here in Dallas, gold is turning to green as spring comes on like gangbusters. This is a poem I've loved for years. It perfectly captures the unbelievable joy and inevitable sorrow of the human condition. It's that piquant combination that defines us. First beauty beyond all imagining and then it fades away like youth, like spring, like the dawn, and like the loss of Eden.

I'm writing this today on Easter, so I can't help but think as well of the promise of the return to Eden. A promise you can see prefigured in every spring, in every dawn and in every blooming flower.