With No Words to Say It

He could have made no greater plea.
And, now alone, she understood
The others who had come and gone, their having asked
So much the less of good.
His clean, unscabbard will caught in her mind,
The chastened point unloosening the knot
Of some protective inability to give
For what she would have had-and blindly never got.
And yet her once too fluent words now found no way
To tell him she determined to explore
His deeper world she saw was worth the having
And worth the struggle for.

RUTH G. V AN HORN.