We learned not to meet anymore, We don't raise our eyes to one another, But we ourselves won't guarantee What could happen to us in an hour.

The word dropped like a stone on my still living breast. Confess: I was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.

But here, in the murk of conflagration, where scarcely a friend is left to know we, the survivors, do not flinch from anything, not from a single blow. Surely the reckoning will be made after the passing of this cloud. We are the people without tears, straighter than you ... more proud.

The secret of secrets is inside me again.

I know beginnings, I know endings too, and life-in-death, and something else I'd rather not recall just now.

I am not one of those who left the land to the mercy of its enemies. Their flattery leaves me cold, my songs are not for them to praise.

Not, not mine: it's somebody else's wound; I could never have borne it. So take the thing that happened, hide it, stick it in the ground; whisk the lamps away.