For Transient Things

Let us thank God for unfulfilled desire,
For beauty that escapes our clutch and flies;
Let us thank God for loveliness that dies,
For violet leapings of a dying fire,
For ebbing lives and seas, the fading choir
Of quiet stars, the momentary guise
That love assumes within a lover's eyes
Before it fades with other things that tire.
Better that beauty wear into the night
An inky garment of uncandled hours
Than stay forever robed in festal white,
And so, familiar grown, like flowers
One counts as common weeds, begin to pall--
Better that beauty should not be at all.

                          ~ James A.S. McPeek