“They’re saying that this crisis
is going to be the end of
America being the richest, most powerful
country in the world,”
my daughter Virginia tells me.
“I know.”
“It’s like ‘nothing gold can stay,'” she says. “Do you know that poem?”
She shows it to me on her MacBook Pro.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Robert Frost, 1874-1963
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.
And we talk about empires
rising and falling,
good and evil,
and if what we always thought
was ever true.
Painting with Words 