nothing gold can stay

Ecollective poetry editor Hermine Pinson sent an email with “On taking your time” in the subject line to Ecollective member Toni Wynn.

We do need to take time out of mind to get back on time in the mind-made world through the natural world.

The message developed into an email poem which, with Toni’s response, became an exquisite corpse — a serial collaboration in which founding Ecollective members begin a verse with the ending word of the previous verse.

From: hermine pinson
Date: Sun, Feb 4, 2024 at 10:56 PM
Subject: On taking your time
To: T, Jacqui, me, Margaret, Kendra

Toni,
An old favorite that remains true.

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.

Sent from my iPhone

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: juliette harris

Date: Mon. Feb 5, 2024 at 7:06 pm

To: Hermine, T, Jacqui, Margaret, Kendra

but gold does stay … for daze on end!

robert frost contrives to make rhyme with “hold”

nature’s “first green” is green (pale green shoots), not gold

golden ore will endure within earth ringed with golden sunlight

until the planet is engulfed by the sun or swallowed or ejected

(among “The Four Ways the World Will Actually End”)

and even then gold or its glittering kin (like silver’s platinum) will solidify from energies

on another planet that is cooked in the gasses of a system like the one revolving around our sun

———————————————————————————————-

From: Toni Wynn

Sun argues its dominance

with cloud cover, puff

magnet that rides above us

sometimes. 

Rides away.

How is it that we keep the sun? 

No trifling effort. 

But plus ça change, plus

ça le mème chose.

Gilded vista 

mottled by afternoon fog

—————————————————————————————————

From: Hermine Pinson

Fog disappears drop by drop under

the sun which is busy heating the ground

and backs of landed goslings,

their gander and goose having imprinted 

their first formation in a baseball field in the suburbs.

Soon they will test the mettle of their grey feathers 

against the sky's blue promise, which to a goose

might look a lot like freedom or gold.