Set on the mansard roof-tops where the pigeons
Take their walks. It is like introspection
To stare inside, or retrospection,
A star inside a rectangle, a recollection:
This hollow square could easily have been there.
--The childish snow-forts, built in flashier winters,
Could have reached these proportions and been houses;
The mighty snow-forts, four, five, stories high,
Withstanding spring as sand-forts do the tide,
Their walls, their shape, could not dissolve and die,
Only be overlapping in a strong chain, turned to stone,
And grayed and yellowed now like these.
Where is the ammunition, the piled-up balls
With the star-splintered hearts of ice?
This sky is no carrier-warrior-pigeon
Escaping endless intersecting circles.
It is a dead one, or the sky from which a dead one fell.
She brings us back to Paris now, with the “star-splintered hearts of ice.” But she combines this with her memories of the snow, as the ammunition is snowballs. She is easing her audience into her thoughts and fears of war.
Paris 7 A.M.