The Poetess and the Dying Butterfly

There, upon the high hill,
there, in the still late afternoons,
a girl of fanciful dreams
floats through their faraway skies;
silence, and shade, and her thoughts
are her companions, and the fruiting sarha tree.

Her life is a singular poem
whose wellspring is feeling and its fires,
a bewildering, wandering dream
whose colors are drawn from the restlessness of longing;
her life is a sea whose depths lie far away,
though its shores appear to the eye.

How beautiful existence is... yet
she was wakened from her sweet reverie
by a butterfly fallen upon the earth,
bidding farewell to its last breaths,
dying in silence, as though the meadow's open spaces
had never brimmed over with its bridal feasts.

She drew near to it and bent above it,
lifting it up, pitying and tender:
O my sister, what is this? Has the dew forsaken you,
that you die in your radiant days?
Have the flowers turned from you? Have the drifting breezes
of the hills let your love go astray?

And night flooded in like a sea in spate,
and she went down beneath the billows of evening,
stumbling along the path, murmuring,
her eyes fixed upon the sky:
O Creator of the universe, if only You had kept it safe
from the cruelty of death and the violence of perishing!