"(…) O Sword, you are the younger brother, the latter-born,
your Triumph, however exultant, must one day be over,
in the beginning was the Word.’’
In the first poem, the narrator talks about the power possessed by words and how they can influence our lives. She mentions the proverb that states that the word is mightier than the sword and analyzes how that came to be true in the history of mankind. The author mentions the efforts society put into destroying various writings and manuscripts considered as being dangerous. The writings in question always survived in one way or another and this is proof for the author that the Word is mightier than the Sword.
"but gods always face two-ways,
so let us search the old highways’’
After talking about the death of the Gods, the narrator assures the reader that while the Gods may be absent from our present life, they are not completely extinct. She reminds the reader that we can always recover and rediscover the old faiths by looking backwards, by searching our history and by analyzing the way our ancestors lived. Thus, the author argues that in order to live a beautiful and meaningful life, we sometimes have to look backwards and try and search the beliefs of our ancestors instead of looking almost obsessively towards the future.
"parasite, I find nourishment:
when you cry in disgust,’’
The poet talks about the way the war affected the world she lived in and how everyone had to fight for survival. She admits that some transformed into worms, parasites feeding from the life force of everything that had life in it just to continue living another day. Instead of criticizing this way of life, the narrator agrees that it became something crucial and that the people who lived that way were not influenced by greed or selfish desires but rather by their instincts.
