THE NAME SHE called me by, like a flourishing jasmine, covered the whole seventeen years of our love. With its sound mingled the quiver of the light through the leaves, the scent of the grass in the rainy night, and the sad silence of the last hour of many an idle day. Not the work of God alone was he who answered to that name; she created him again for herself during those seventeen swift years. Other years were to follow, but their vagrant days, no longer gathered within the fold of that name uttered in her voice, stray and are scattered. They ask me, 'Who should fold us?' I find no answer and sit silent, and they cry to me while dispersing, 'We seek a shepherdess!' Whom should they seek? That they do not know. And like derelict evening clouds they drift in the trackless dark, and are lost and forgotten.
TIRED OF waiting, you burst your bonds, impatient flowers, before the winter had gone. Glimpses of the unseen comer reached your wayside watch, and you rushed out running and panting, impulsive jasmines, troops of riotous roses. You were the first to march to the breach of death, your clamour of colour and perfume troubled the air. You laughed and pressed and pushed each other, bared your breast and dropped in heaps. The Summer will come in its time, sailing in the floodtide of the south wind. But you never counted slow moments to be sure of him. You recklessly spent your all in the road, in the terrible joy of faith. You heard his footsteps from afar, and flung your mantle of death for him to tread upon. Your bonds break even before the rescuer is seen, you make him your own ere he can come and claim you.
