Gold and Silver Apples

Lately, as I have pondered assorted metal hues, my far-away daughter has been taking photographs steeped in gold.

Just as Fields of Gold has a lovely version sung in a female voice; Yeats’ Song of Wandering Aengus (which is in fact a poem) has been given a female voice.

When I was a high school senior, I enlisted the help of many friends in painting a mural–which somehow has not faded–high up in the school’s entryway.  It has bright rainbow colors and is segmented (in a very then-mod way) with scenes from nature and snippets of favorite quotes.

I notice now that, in keeping with my personality–and nicely dovetailing with the prior decade’s outsized colors and cartoon shapes–my painting style was one of clear, bright-line distinctions among colors, not the light and shading and nuance of my daughters’ paintings and photographs.

One of the mural’s quotes is from Yeats and accompanies a bright painted sun, referencing “The silver apples of the moon,/The golden apples of the sun.”

Went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.