"Early, early": the poem opens by saying its first word twice, as if the speaker were still half in the dark and catching up with the day. What follows is a walk at dawn. Two people come down a forest path after a night that was plainly frightening. We never learn what they fled or why. Instead the poem gives us the aftermath: sweat falling to the soil, a heart "still beating fast with fear," a scarf clutched like a cape. Its central idea is that safety is felt in the body before it can be explained, and that when peace arrives it is small and ordinary: two apples, a tree trunk to lean on, eyes closing.
The poem is in free verse, with short lines of uneven length and no regular rhyme scheme. Its most striking structural habit is the -ing word. Line after line begins with a participle: "Walking," "Coming," "Clutching," "Stopping," "Taking," "Resting," "Sitting," "Leaning." The effect is of a camera tracking the pair, with nothing finished and everything still in motion, which suits people who cannot yet stop moving. The lists of nouns at the start ("Sap in the trees, dew on the leaves") have no verbs at all, so the forest seems to hang in the air. The first moment a person simply acts is "She leaves from his side," and the next line announces "No more afraid." The grammar relaxes as the fear does.
Sound works in quiet pockets rather than a pattern. "A tickle behind the ear / A trickle of vapor" is a near-echo that makes the fading breeze almost audible. The one clean rhyme comes at the apple: "than any she'd picked before" is followed by "Sweet and juicy all the way down to the core." It is fitting that the neatest sound falls on the sweetest moment. Near the end, "awake" and "wake" chime across the closing lines, tying the sleepless night to the new day.
The imagery moves from damp and murky to bright. The opening is all moisture and low visibility: fog, dew, sap, vapor. Then come "the last moonlight," the rising Sun, and finally "the light" itself. The lifting fog mirrors the lifting fear. Even the wind shrinks along with the danger, passing from "sea gusts" to a mere "tickle behind the ear." The body is always present, too. His "bare hands" open the path, her hand rests on his back, her arm is "wrapped around dearly." He clears the way yet is "still struggling to stand," so it is she who steadies him and then goes to pick the fruit. Care passes between them rather than flowing one way, and "one for her and one for him" carries that balance into the sharing of the apples.
Two images stand out because the poem refuses to explain them. One is the tower "leaning into the clouds," with its "rows and rows of columns." It matters less as a place than as a measure: it "remind[s] them / How far the journey has taken." The other is the apple tree. A reader may hear a faint echo of the Eden story in a pair, a tree, and fruit taken by hand. If so, the poem reverses it, since here the fruit brings rest instead of loss, and the ground they sit on is a refuge, not an exile. That is an inference from the imagery, not something the text says outright.
The ending is deliberately gentle: "Glad to see the morning grow." Letting a morning *grow*, like something alive, is a small and hopeful choice. A few phrases bend ordinary English, such as "nearsight" and "hearts of wake," and they give the language a slightly dreamlike, tired texture that suits the scene.
The poem's value lies in what it leaves out. Many stories about escape spend their energy on the danger. This one spends it on the exhale afterward, and it trusts details like sweat, a scarf, and a shared apple to imply the whole night behind them. For students it is a good example of how a poem can tell a story by withholding most of it, and how rhythm and sound can make a reader feel the same relief the characters do.