Between Green and Gold

The garden holds its breath— frost-white mornings give way to afternoons thick with pollen, bees drunk on impossible blooms.

Everything here is borrowed time. The tulips lean toward their own forgetting, petals curled like letters we meant to send but never did.

In the hedge, a thrush insists on the same three notes, as if repetition could make permanence, could stall the wheel that turns us all from green to gold to ash.

I watch the light change— how it catches the new leaves and holds them, briefly, as if to say: this is enough. This moment, this ordinary light, this is the only forever we get.