A gun went off in her mind;
A dawn of war broke in upon her head.
Yesterday, she lavished periphrasis
on a rose; but today, a thing is just a thing,
and yields description, not interpretation.
Imagination has been banished from the kingdom,
and the chill of the real rises cold
to stage a grim resistance
to the power of the shaping mind.
In a narrow land, all thinking,
all pursuit of truth
takes place in the dark.
Poets fall off mountains
and philosophers grasp at stars.
The rock on which you built
your self, your holy self,
offers no foundation;
it cracks under the gaze
of a quiet introspection.
What was once the self
is also but a thing, impervious
to the word that shapes and gives.
The facts of war efface the origins
of every tongue
and freeze the life of language
in a present present. History
is now and always.
This horizon of conflict
awaits a dawn
arising from a Greek land,
which heralds unity and song;
a sun unfreezing the word
and expanding consciousness
of the given, not as thing
but as idea;
an idea formed in the mind
of a poet speaking out
of the dawn
and with the dawn.