The speaker begins in a kind of emptiness, where the only warning of something coming is a faint ringing that swells into a screech and then a thud on the shoulder. It sounds alarming at first, but the poem quickly turns: that contact calms them. Compared with the "deafening silence" that came before, it feels like relief, and the mention of "hazel mirrors" suggests another person's eyes looking back, so that life seems to arrive through that gaze.
Judging by the imagery, the call may be a person, a companion or lover, who pulls the speaker out of isolation. Once the speaker answers, the tone shifts from passive to determined. Together they "wage war against the quiet," the nothingness and the dark, and the short, stacked lines make that fight feel steady and deliberate. The mood moves from unease to comfort to quiet defiance. The final line, "We love, dear," is brief and tender, and it settles the poem into warmth after all that struggle.