PARDON ME, if in my pride, O maiden of a century, yet to be born, I picture you reading my poems, While the moon fills the gaps in my verse with its shower of silence. I seem to feel your heart throb and hear you murmur, 'If I were alive today and had we met he would love me.' I know you say to yourself, 'Only for this night let me light my lamp for him at my balcony, though I know he may never come.'
HE IS TALL and lean, withered to the bone with long repeated fever, like a dead tree unable to draw a single drop of sap from anywhere. In despairing patience, his mother carries him like a child into the sun, where he sits by the roadside in the shortening shadows of each forenoon. The world passes by-a woman to fetch water, a herd-boy with cattle to pasture, a laden cart to the distant market-and the mother hopes that some least stir of life may touch the awful torpor of her dying son.
