Showing posts with label prose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prose. Show all posts

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Autumn: Nothing Gold Can Stay

September is my favourite month. The days are sunny and warm with a nip in the air. The nights are chilly, allowing me to snuggle under my down comforter. Most of the trees here in the foothills are still green, but oft their edges are tipped with gold, their hardest hue to hold, as Mr. Frost so aptly penned.

This morning the sun chased me from under my warm nest of covers. I slipped outside as the Morning Star illumined the yellow leaves of a tree that had turned early. My eyes lingered on the half-green, half-amber dryads lining the river. A gilded stream of leaves coursed through the channel along the sidewalk. The chill breeze chased the citron leaves along the street, their frail frames scuttling the direction I, too, traversed. They chased me like an unbidden memory invades the present. I let them come. Indeed, I hardly had the power to stop their swirling dance any more than I could quell an impetuous memory.

Freshness hung in the air, mingling with the aroma of crunching leaves. Sunshine filtered through the torn cotton clouds and settled on the distant Pike's Peak, crowning it with gold. But even the gold of early dawn could not long tarry, and neither could I. I dropped my letters in the post box and made for home, eager to read the next chapter in Orthodoxy; but that is a topic for another post.


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.

~ Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Frost



Tuesday, April 13, 2010

One Clear Call for Me


"Sunset and Evening Star,

And one clear call for me..."


...To write. To cherish things past. To long for dusty pages of well bound tomes. To appreciate paper, ink, and the dripping wax of the candle on my desk.

Who am I? I am a keeper of things past. A guardian who will not allow ancient words to be forgotten. Tennyson and Wordsworth, Locke and Burke: their words and ideas have long shaped us. Saint Paul, the Creeds and Confessions: longer still have they chiseled our hearts and minds. Luther and Erasmus, too, gave the common man tools to analyze texts, and set the Scriptures in his own tongue.

Tongue. Language, words, expression, speech, thoughts... These are a beacon to arouse and alarm, to humble and bless, to bewilder and charm. Words express ideas, they must be carefully chosen, wrought into concise thought. Ideas must be worthy of being spoken, penned, or taught.

Eloquence and rhetoric have been pushed aside for the caustic inarticulation of postmodernism. Words have been uprooted, their meanings changed or stolen.

"Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark!"

A twilight on words and Beauty? Does "Beauty" even make sense if meaning is given by the hearer? My head lifts in hope: yes. Words have objective meaning. Poetry and prose intend what the author seeks to convey.

Long after darkness falls, grey meets the East. Light streaks along the horizon, licking the clouds like a tongue of flame with vibrant oranges, reds, and dazzling golds. Yes! The sun rises after the dark.

I am a keeper of words, a teacher of language. They will LIVE. Another will rise up to take my place, to excel me when I have crossed the bar.


~ Johanna