A Spring Bouquet

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Spring comes earlier to California than to much of North America, and recently it has come on in full. The crabapples and plum trees bloomed a few weeks ago, as did the hyacinths and daffies and tulips and other early bulbs. But now the deciduous trees, including my beloved japanese maples, are unfurling, and I’m reminded as I always am of Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” I offer it here—my spring bouquet for readers.

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.

Leave it to Frost to give an elegiac tone to springtime. As Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 18, “every fair from fair sometime declines …”