When the light that kisses the back of our eyes was birthed, our ancestors had not yet existed.

It was they who toiled underneath their suns and stars to make sure that we would someday breathe our first breaths, we who were exhausted from the labors of our own births and uncertain of the walls that had been constructed to encompass our futures.

Cherry saplings were planted beneath black soil and canals were dug to create the rivers that would pour the fruitage of generations between our gaping, thirsty lips.

Golden flashes fell like sunlight drizzle into the palms of our forefathers, and they grasped them with such desire; they buried the treasured beneath their graves and prayed that their efforts would not be wasted. 

They wrote the songs that would dry upon the voices of our mothers, the stories that would be whispered with haste as we were wrapped with blankets and kissed goodnight.

They did not live to see their cherry trees bear sweet red upon the Eden that they had formed from the perspiration that spilled off their backs; they did not live to smell the earthy textures of their man-made streams cutting through these laden forests.

When the light that kisses the back of our eyes was birthed, our ancestors had not yet existed, but once our eyes had been brushed by these ancient galaxies, centuries have long since passed since they did.

We have lived only to see the cherry trees wither and blow away as the dust within the breezes that blast our mountains tirelessly. The rivers have drained, receding beneath the Earth and leaving us to grasp vainly at the dirt, searching for the promises that have dried away with it.

We uncover the graves of our ancestors and find the bodies of the men who had hoped that their legacy would sustain us and their children.

But leaf subsides to leaf and Eden sank to grief, no matter how many handfuls of gold graced the calloused fingers of these men.

For nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold, but it has been held for too long as a prisoner petrified within the amber of our imaginations, and once brought into fruition, has only become faded and creviced by the realities of our lives.

When the light that kisses the back of our eyes was birthed, our ancestors had not yet existed. But we hold these handfuls of hard hues in our fingers, the only fruitage that we've reaped from these dreams that have been erased by the pace of history, by the overgrowth of new trees that have sprung on their own, by the streams that find their way to the oceans without the help of the human hand, and we know better.

For dawn goes down to day, and nothing gold can stay.