When a conversation ceases, after a period of nearly ten months, on the discovery that the ship (or more modestly, perhaps a skiff ?) lovingly hand built, was in real time rotten - no make that riddled - with gaping lies and deceptions, and thus was slowly sinking among the drifting ice of words of useless justifications, and even more words of usless accusations, what is a bruised Robinson, who somehow managed to swim back to the island, left with?

A clutch of drafty poems, some twenty odd in number, which sing mostly of love that was real, for a woman who was not.

Robinson first thinks of using these as tinder for the first fire he lights on the island's shore, to keep warm, and to stare into for the forms of people whom he could talk to but cannot - his reticence to speak is an old habit. But one doesn't destroy one's own offspring. But one can keep one's own offspring as reserves, as offerings for the cannibals, i.e., silences who will soon return, smelling easy prey.

In this summer of wide-open-eyed hatred and blind love, I'm begining to belive again in all the little things that will fill the holes left by the shells: soil, a bit of grass, perhaps, after the rains, small insects of every kind. I think of the children growing up half in the ethics of their fathers and half in the science of war. The tears now penetrate into my eyes from the outside and my ears invent, every day, the footsteps of the messenger of good tidings.

Translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell