Daylight

It’s a white sun that softens

the bronze women on the monuments.

You’d like to disappear to the houses, wake up

where slow wagons drag

iron bars to the countryside—

because there in the ditches

children rage in the water, at dawn,

and images of poplars collapse.

To follow the dance

of an old pipe organ,

we’d run in the wind along the streets . . .

barefoot at heart

and with threadbare weights

of joy.

27 January 1938