Poem

I saw the world—
the wind-stirred ridges,
mountains pillowed by upstraining clouds,
the wrinkled flash of leaf-trellised water,
or frost-powdered crispness of winter sunrise—
myself the centre,
the world a dream
And then the war . . .
Iron could break the crystal of my life
like the glass of others,
Ice-ribbed despair.
The world three-dimensionally stark
like a charred forest.
—Myself the dream.
Sense blunt,
pleasure not absent,
but amorphous, numb,
existence a steel blue ache.

—Georges de la Tour Noire.