Agere

The leaves have lost their agency,
But for now they’ll have to do,
Since butterflies have lost their lives,

And only the wind blows through.
The old poems have lost their beauty.
They swirl in papery heaps,

Half-rotted, dank, and skeletal,
But when the wind’s strong, they creep.
The old ideas prove helpless now

To prevent what they thought sin,
But strange as they sound, and ugly,
They fly ahead of the wind.