The Shy Moonlight Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Pretty as a child in the
Throes of truancy—tumbling down hill
With lilacs in her hair and the dogs following her:
Just a succession of paper wings
In the hallucinating lamplight not far afield from
Her parents,
But enough to be forgotten and given over
To the playground’s caressing caesuras:
Now they say she is here, in a whisper,
As if a coloring book of a church—
And she mimics the sweat broiling off the tin cans of
The trailer parks over her shoulders,
Until she pushes herself into a saint of those arcs—
And sees the shy moonlight in the face of
A pond—
As beneath her, the traffic sounds, and it’s saddest
Realities make their stumbling away across the grounds.