The Wheel

... With Michel Trad's return to poetry,
its fragrance returns to the white lily,
its pride returns to the red rose,
and the colors and sweet scents return to spring...

A wheel she rolls through the twilights of the vanishing light,
and her age, like the lily's, is twelve years —
knowing nothing, taking no account of these days.

Her dress is gay with an iris hue,
an iris-lilac tucked at the pocket-slits,
with green buttons, and its sash trailing the wide world behind her.

And snatches of song go circling round her;
a heap of black cherry-stones, set out in the dust —
he scampered off with it, and mischief crossed his mind.

. . . . .

He saw her vanish down the road; she returned no answer,
and that dream heaved a sigh in his head and died away,
and her wheel went on rolling in the mist.

Written specially for The Woman's Voice.