Rainy Vista
“Green was the silence, wet was the light,
the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”
S and D circumnavigated the Flatirons Vista trail this evening, with rain nearby to the east and to the south. Along the way, various white, purple, and yellow flowers, in quite a dazzling display amid the vibrant green grass. Also en route, a few hikers, a bike or two, a dog who galloped down the trail and leaped joyfully into a ditch. Some mosquitoes. A good, wide, gravelly trail.
At the base near the pond, a guy with a lightning trigger on his camera, attempting some shots of the approaching storm. Also a bridal or engagement photography session, and a group of girls who looked like folk singers ready for their album cover photo.
Notes
You know how I prefer to verify quotation sources and translations, so here is the Neruda quote, in the original Spanish, from the website Archivo Chile (https://www.archivochile.com/Homenajes/neruda/de_neruda/homenajepneruda0018.pdf):
Era verde el silencio, mojada era la luz,
temblaba el mes de Junio como una mariposa
DeepL.com translates this (somewhat less poetically) as
The silence was green, the light was wet,
the month of June was trembling like a butterfly
So for once it seems that the posterized versions, found sprinkled around the web without context, are reasonably accurate. (By “posterized” I mean the quotes in Twitter messages, blog posts (heaven forbid), and inspirational posters; and good luck finding anything about the original source.)
And you can find the whole sonnet in English at Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9838732-sonnet-xl-green-was-the-silence-wet-was-the-light).
