It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.

A choir of angels glorified the hour, the vault of heaven was dissolved in fire. "Father, why hast Thou forsaken me? Mother, I beg you, do not weep for me.

No, not under the vault of another sky, not under the shelter of other wings. I was with my people then, there where my people were doomed to be.

As the future ripens in the past, so the past rots in the future -- a terrible festival of dead leaves.

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.

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

And it seemed to me that there were fires Flying till dawn without number And I never found out things-those Strange eyes of his-what colour? Everything trembling and singing and Were you my enemy or my friend, Winter was it or summer?