Watch-fire. One sits around it and waits

Watch-fire. One sits around it and waits.

Waits for someone to sing.

But one is so tired.

The red light is heavy.

It rests on dusty shoes.

It crawls up to the knees,

it looks into the folded hands.

It has no wings.

The faces are dark.

Yet for a while the eyes of the little Frenchman

glow with their own light.

He has kissed a small rose,

and now it may continue to wilt on his breast.

Von Langenau saw it

because he could not sleep.

He thinks: I have no rose, none.

Then he sings.

And it as an old, sad, song,

that the girls sing at home in the fields,

when the harvests near their end in the fall.