bluer scarce

A bird flew out of a tree. In the garden the sun came out from behind a cloud.

The perfume from the rose hedge. He stood just beyond the wall. She looked down from her window.

In the garden's day they sat on separate seats. Her father a way apart read from a book. They both kept their gaze on the persimmon tree.

The rose is a most beautiful flower, he said.

Her head she lowered softly. Her father turned a page in his book. The bird flew across the cut grass.

There were two children. He tilled a field for her father and helped mend the stone wall. She crushed the wheat for the cakes. At the table the older child placed his grave eyes on the script of his script book. The younger sat by her feet.

When the first rocket flew over she was fearful but he said he must go to the city. She told him not to go but he said he must go.

That was at the end of a summer of little rain. Her father had become old and bent by then. There was little water for the roses. She kept her children with her, inside the wall. Occasionally at night a rocket passed across and there would be a light somewhere in the sky. But the city was far away.

*

The night was not lit by moon, but by the light of guns. He lay in the muck watching the dark shape across the ditch. He trained his rifle on the shape for a long time thinking it might move. When he squeezed the trigger all he heard was the report. But there was nothing else. It was still all mainly dark and he did not look higher so did not see the other bird flying down at him.

The shell explodes in his face. Oh my country, oh my beloved wife, my children. The blood drains from him, draining away with the last memory of his courtship, to just a faint glimmer of her, faint and cold and stiffening in his sad eyes.

That night there was no question of moon, nor of any other light, it was a night of listening, a night given to the faint and soughing sighing stirring at night in little pleasure gardens, shy the sabbath of leaves and petals and the air that eddies there in places as it does not in others where there is less constraint, does and as it not during the day, when there is more vigilance, something and then else that is not clear, being neither the air far nor what it moves, perhaps the unchanging noise the earth makes and which they cover, but not for long than bluer scarce than stare before them deep, namely the fullness of the great and its unchanging calm.