Ella Peirce

How could someone care so little about something so beautiful?

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.

We were gifted trees and grasses and flowers and fields.

All placed dutifully, carefully, specifically. I don’t know if any of it was intended to be a gift to us, to humanity, but wouldn’t it be rude not to receive it as such?

Four seasons to cycle through; I feel like I was born to revel in the daylight and feel the snowflakes melt on my skin—to see the leaves snicker at each other in the fall and see the revival of that hopeful shade of green in the spring.

And above it all, the golden sun rays paint every lingering moment into something new, something moldable to the eye of the beholder. To the optimists with a sunny disposition, the kind of people with summer birthdays and sunflowers sewn into their skin, the sun is Midas.

In the gold-coated garden that is this Earth, I watch, half-aware, as the ground is trampled in front of me. I used to look away; there was so much else surrounding me that I believed a few crushed blossoms were just a part of life—a sacrifice for the greater good of the garden.

Now, I’m not so sure.

I’ve been pummeled with contrasting ideas for years, half of me petrified and half of me passive.

Now, I’m sure that I am petrified.

I’m no longer the age where I don’t have to care. The world is at an age where we need to care. 

We were given oceans and ponds and rivers and lakes. 

We have rain that pours and waves that crash cyclically and cacophonously, changing landscapes and drowning fears. Even in the deepest, darkest waters, the gold reaches. Sun and water, warm and cool, Yin and Yang. We have beaches to lay on and decks to jump off of. 

We are biding time, and they—the rare few who have the power to do something of impact—are wasting it. 

We were left with valleys and mountains and deserts and rainforests. 

The scenery of dreams, the once-in-a-lifetime beauty of a thousand planets. 

Not everything golden has to be gilded; the garden could’ve stay intact, delicate and uncrumpled. It didn’t—it doesn’t—have to be a fleeting period of marvelous rarity burned away and left behind in the infinity. 

I’ve spent nearly 17 years staring at trees through windows, dreaming about the sunsets I’d seen before, rolling down hills, sticking my tongue out whenever it snows, wondering about all of the places I could go and the sights I could see. Even in my youth, in every starry night I saw past my bedtime, every blade of grass I ripped from the soil, and every tree I climbed, I felt it.

I’ve spent nearly 17 years chasing something impalpable that I could feel whenever nature’s psyche presented itself in front of me. 

I guess I’m just a nearly 17-year-old girl who finds something so beautiful that she doesn’t think it should be destroyed, she thinks it should be preserved and protected. She knows it should be. But she doesn’t know why people disagree with her, why people don’t feel the way she feels in the golden glow of the sun cast over trees and flowers and oceans and hills and plains.

The removed third stanza of “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost, via the Poetry Foundation:

In gold as it began

The world will end for man.

And some belief avow

The world is ending now.

The final age of gold

In what we now behold.

If so, we’d better gaze,

For nothing golden stays.