But! now for the battle! Now for murder--now for the real thing! My third springtime is approaching! Winds! lean, serious as a virgin, seeking, seeking the flowers of March. Seeking flowers nowhere to be found, they twine among the bare branches in insatiable eagerness-- they whirl up the snow seeking under it-- they--the winds--snakelike roar among yellow reeds seeking flowers--flowers. I spring among them seeking one flower in which to warm myself! I deride with all the ridicule of misery-- my own starved misery. Counter-cutting winds strike against me refreshing their fury! Come, good, cold fellows! Have we no flowers? Defy then with even more desperation than ever--being lean and frozen! But though you are lean and frozen-- think of the blue bulls of Babylon. Fling yourselves upon their empty roses-- cut savagely! But-- think of the painted monastery at Fiesole. BERKET AND THE STARS A day on the boulevards chosen out of ten years of student poverty! One best day out of ten good ones. Berket in high spirits--"Ha, oranges! Let's have one!" And he made to snatch an orange from the vender's cart. Now so clever was the deception, so nicely timed to the full sweep of certain wave summits, that the rumor of the thing has come down through three generations--which is relatively forever! A CELEBRATION A middle-northern March, now as always-- gusts from the south broken against cold winds-- but from under, as if a slow hand lifted a tide, it moves--not into April--into a second March, the old skin of wind-clear scales dropping upon the mould: this is the shadow projects the tree upward causing the sun to shine in his sphere. So we will put on our pink felt hat--new last year! --newer this by virtue of brown eyes turning back the seasons--and let us walk to the orchid-house, see the flowers will take the prize to-morrow at the Palace. Stop here, these are our oleanders. When they are in bloom-- You would waste words It is clearer to me than if the pink were on the branch. It would be a searching in a coloured cloud to reveal that which now, huskless, shows the very reason for their being.