GOD's GREAT power is in the gentle breeze, not in the storm.

I LONG TO GO over there to the further bank of the river,
Where those boats are tied to the bamboo poles in a line;
Where men cross over in their boats in the morning with ploughs on their shoulders to till their far-away fields;
Where the cowherds make their lowing cattle swim across to the riverside pasture;
Whence they all come back home in the evening, leaving the jackals to howl in the island overgrown with weeds.
Mother, if you don't mind, I should like to become the boatman of the ferry when I am grown up.
They say there are strange pools hidden behind that high bank,
Where flocks of wild ducks come when the rains are over, and thick reeds grow round the margins where waterbirds lay their eggs;
Where snipes with their dancing tails stamp their tiny footprints upon the clean soft mud;
Where in the evening the tall grasses crested with white flowers invite the moonbeam to float upon their waves.
Mother, if you don't mind, I should like to become the boatman of the ferryboat when I am grown up.
I shall cross and cross back from bank to bank, and all the boys and girls of the village will wonder at me while they are bathing.
When the sun climbs the mid sky and morning wears on to noon,
I shall come running to you, saying, 'Mother, I am hungry!'
When the day is done and the shadows cower under the trees, I shall come back in the dusk.
I shall never go away from you into the town to work like father.
Mother, if you don't mind, I should like to become the boatman of the ferryboat when I am grown up.

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.