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.