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!
The speaker recalls a relatively trivial event that has nevertheless become a handed-down family story, at least in recent generations. The memory will soon be lost except that it is, Shakespeare-like, enshrined forever as a poem. One orange from a cart, one star from the sky, one memory: “insignificant” but eternal.