“It isn’t as bad as you sometimes think it is.”

Gordon B. Hinckley

The dead stalks of my peony lay on the frozen ground.

All color dashed away to dust -- twas just a lifeless mound.

What comfort could this quietus give unto me at all?

It was a bleak reminder of my mortally slow crawl.

A melancholy fool was I, for underneath the land

My peony still slumbered, preparing something grand.

I looked upon my peony this morning to behold

Its sudden reaching to the sky, with globes of pastel gold.

A touch of warmth, a bit of rain, had given it the power

To once again revive and create flower after flower.

The world is full of peonies, and so I need to strive

To see them ev’rywhere I go and keep my hope alive.