'WHAT OF THE night?' they ask.
No answer comes.
For the blind Time gropes in a maze and knows not its path or purpose.
The darkness in the valley stares like the dead eye-sockets of a giant, the clouds like a nightmare oppress the sky, and the massive shadows lie scattered like the torn limbs of the night.
A lurid glow waxes and wanes on the horizon,
is it an ultimate threat from an alien-star,
or an elemental hunger licking the sky?
Things are deliriously wild,
they are a noise whose grammar is a groan,
and words smothered out of shape and sense.
They are the refuse, the rejections, the fruitless failures of life,
abrupt ruins of prodigal pride,
fragments of a bridge over the oblivion Of a vanished stream,
godless shrines that shelter reptiles,
marble steps that lead to blankness.
Sudden tumults rise in the sky and wrestle
and a startled shudder runs along the sleepless hours.
Are they from desperate floods
hammering against their cave walls,
or from some fanatic storms
whirling and howling incantations?
Are they the cry of an ancient forest
flinging up its hoarded fire in a last extravagant suicide,
or screams of a paralytic crowd scourged by lunatics blind and deaf?
Underneath the noisy terror a stealthy hum creeps up like
bubbling volcanic mud,
a mixture of sinister whispers, rumours and slanders, and hisses of derision.
The men gathered there are vague like torn pages of an epic.
Groping in groups or single, their torchlight tattoos their faces in chequered lines, in patterns of frightfulness.
The maniacs suddenly strike their neighbours on suspicion and a hubbub of an indiscriminate fight bursts forth echoing from hill to hill.
The women weep and wail,
they cry that their children are lost in a wilderness of contrary paths with confusion at the end.
Others defiantly ribald shake with raucous laughter
their lascivious limbs unshrinkingly loud,
for they think that nothing matters.

MOTHER, I do want to leave off my lessons now. I have been at my book all the morning.
You say it is only twelve o'clock. Suppose it isn't any later; can't you ever think it is afternoon when it is only twelve o'clock?
I am easily imagine now that the sun has reached the edge of that
rice-field, and the old fisher-woman is gathering herbs for her supper by the side of the pond.
I can just shut my eyes and think that the shadows are growing darker under the madar tree, and the water in the pond looks shiny black.
If twelve o'clock can come in the night, why can't the night come when it is twelve o'clock.

THE ODOUR CRIES in the bud, 'Ah me, the day departs, the happy day of spring, and I am a prisoner in petals!'
Do not lose heart, timid thing!
Your bonds will burst, the bud will open into flower, and when you die in the fulness of life, even then the spring will live on.
The odour pants and flutters within the bud, crying, 'Ah me, the hours pass by, yet I do not know where I go, or what it is I seek!'
Do not lose heart, timid thing!
The spring breeze has overheard your desire, the day will not end before you have fulfilled your being.
Dark is the future to her, and the odour cries in despair, 'Ah me, through whose fault is my life so unmeaning?'
'Who can tell me, why I am at all?'
Do not lose heart, timid thing!
The perfect dawn is near when you will mingle your life with all life and know at last your purpose.