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!