I like this piece, it's simple yet very descriptive. I dunno about this word though: surreptitious. I think it breaks the simplicity of the poem and feels really out of place. I would replace that word with something else...
It's better to have been beautiful once than never. Though beauty is relatively shallow, it is not without effort to achieve.
We see beauty everywhere and in nature. The piece uses nature as a destroyer of this, which I find interesting. Nature, or at least in the animal kingdom, favors beauty I believe and the piece got me thinking about that.