War (June, 1940)

This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk... the war -

our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation - has

taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I

have no surroundings... Those familiar circumlocutions -

those standards - which have for so many years given back an

echo and so thickened my identity are all wide and wild as

the desert now. I mean, there is no "autumn," no winter.

We pour to the edge of a precipice... and then? I can't

conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.