EXHAUSTED WELLS IN AUGUST

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and ex-

hausted wells

(hyphen in the original)

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

(This fragment I shore against my ruins…)