Nature's First Green Really Is Gold

Nothing Gold Can Stay

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.

I think of this poem every year when things begin to bud out, and new tiny leaves emerge. They have a special brightness, not quite green. And as the poem points out, nothing stays new and untouched forever.