Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

Sic Transit Gloria

Yes, of course I know all that. All
that exists has its time and place in
the sun and then expires. Or its molecules
transformed into some other form of
life, for such is the nature of all
existence, a formula that has not yet
expired itself. To all things there is a
season, and all winter long I watched
my garden languish under a thickly
unrelenting comforter of snow and
ice that brought no comfort to me. I
looked upward toward that tree beside
my front door with its naked branches
tipped with buds and thought how
vulnerable, tentative and hopeful we
all are in life; the tree symbolic of
assurance that the time would come
for those buds to swell with warmth
and gentle breezes, spring rain and
the life-enhancing sun returning to its
peak. Spring is here, those buds did
swell and they became beautiful
large flowers, the petals reaching for
the sky as though the tree had in its
grasp innumerable hands begging to
be forever free to ornament that tree.
Yet the breeze became a wind and rain
shredded those petals and they swooned
falling one by one from the tree. That
too-brief presence of a glorious vision
gone, gone, gone. Bitterly, I complain
to my garden muse and she in her
vast wisdom reprimanded me that
this is the way of all living things by
nature's decree: Sic Transit Gloria.