Agnes Abroad

It was a moon-scorched midnight;
the stars were thoroughly dissolved.
Agnes arose from where she had lain too long.
The deep grass remembered her sleeping frame
as she rubbed bright eyes with fragile fingers.
The maples danced in the warm wind like marionettes,
moving many hands to their own native rhythms.
Songs from wild and unseen mouths
crowded upon the outer edge of silence.
A startled dove took sudden flight
and fled towards the shadowed hill-slopes.
Agnes breathed, and gazed into the black north.
She would fain be beyond those hills
before the first kindling of dawn.
And so, with nightgown fluttering like white fire,
and with bare and furtive feet, she pressed on.