On a morning of dark disquiet, when the birds are mute and their nests
shake in the gust, I sit alone and ask myself, "Where is she?"

The days have flown wherein we sat too near each other; we laughed and
jested, and the awe of love's majesty found no words at our meetings.

I made myself small, and she trifled away every moment with pelting talk.

To-day I wish in vain that she were by me, in the gloom of the coming
storm, to sit in the soul's solitude.



24


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?"