Ask no surety of this flawless morning
for noon or afternoon. Take what may
come—bright or broken day
or dull. Though unreturning
this clear brilliance, it will live unlost
sealed in the amber past.
The ugly duckling flowered into a swan;
and if this child’s beauty, ephemeral, fade
rebuke no promise, made
and broken—there was none.
Beauty owes nothing: by having been has put
the world, rather, in debt.