How shall we mourn you who are killed and wasted,
sure that you would not die with your work unended,
as if the iron scythe in the grass stops for a flower?

The speaker struggles with how to grieve people who have been “killed and wasted,” implying deaths that are premature, violent, or senseless rather than natural. The mourner’s certainty that the dead “would not die with [their] work unended” underscores the human conviction that purpose and intention ought to govern the end of a life. Against that hope, the simile of the “iron scythe in the grass” insists on impersonal, indiscriminate destruction: like a mower cutting through a field, death does not pause for the singular “flower.” The passage thus contrasts human narratives of vocation and unfinished labor with a stark, mechanistic force that interrupts without regard for merit or readiness.