War (June, 1940)

This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk...

This, I thought yesterday, the war

— our waiting, waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation

The war, the war, — has taken away the outer wall of security.

No echo comes back. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings...

Those familiar circumvolutions — 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? And then?

I can't conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.