Let Them Break Their Hold on Me

Illegitimate Things:

WATER still flows—
The thrush still sings 

though in
the skirts of the sky 

at the bottom of
the distance 

huddle . .
. . echoing cannons! 

Whose silence revives
valley after 

valley to peace
as poems still conserve 

the language of
old ecstasies. 

William Carlos Williams.