O afternoon, what memories! 

Just yesterday I was a child leaning over the well, 

Delighted to see my face in the water down below. 

Today, a man, I see my face in the deep water of the world. 

And if I laugh it is only because I was once a different I: 

A child delighted to see his face in the bottom of the well. 

I see them all as flesh of my own flesh. 

I touch my arm and there they are: 

The dead, who never leave me! 

And the dead are all the people, places, and days from my past. 

Sometimes amid the noise of the factory machines 

A nostalgia lightly grazes my arm, 

I turn around, and there in the sunlit yard of my old house 

Stands the child I was, happily ignorant of what I would become.