In A Time of War

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.