© C. L. Frost

Charmaine Frost has published many excellent poems and articles in the Gift of Fire over the years. This is among my favorite of her poems. It's color scheme and concepts are quite Promethean. The implied losses in perceptual values with age are a tragedy of maturity. The poem originally appeared in issue number 43 of Gift of Fire, April 1991. One of my disappointments as Editor of the Gift of Fire is that Charmaine has not graced its pages recently with her works.

Once I imagined that the dusk, each day,

Would dust crags golden and let fall a shower

Of gold coins that the high sky's bronze vault

Could no longer hold. That, of course, was why

The morning lawn showed and showed off

A wealth of dandelion heads not there before --

Pure gold disks abutting, overlapping, in tiers

Rising like piles of newly minted, pure gold coins.

So I thought in awe until they all, by years

Wiser, scolded, "Dandelions are only yellow.

Don't ever call one gold; they come too freely

To have worth, financial or of other kind,"

And so demoted the sky to miser and riches

To mere yellow weeds best mowed over, fool's

Gold, a counterfiet specie. Still, when by drops

The day's luster slipped away, I wondered where

All those colored chips had fallen, onto which

Green laps the largess had randomly splattered;

And wondered why no touted pansies or petunias

Could so multiply overnight and grow glowing

Like new money or a thousand sprinkled tiny suns

As one disgraced mere weed always could.