FACES

Here their attack will come.  Behind,
the vast home, anxious, close-frontiered;
the dim-lit scurry of the mind,
one's own land, ill-known, ware for war,
and amorous of what is feared.
A groping darkness lies before
- enemy country; and yet less
hostile than quite unknown, a guess
at speech and weapon, a no-more-
my-world, a shifting otherness.

And the attack will come between
- here, on this tender salient,
this almost-island only seen
(by garrison or foreign spy)
in unforeseeable event.
Close the bright calyx of the eye,
silence the coloured mouth, undress
the line of ordered comeliness:
here the invading flags will fly,
the sentry fall, and none possess
a lamp to tell his nation by.