... With her child in arms she could pinch bravely and find real....
—I can kiss you now—Baby! little sister!—we wait together for him who is coming back.
—Coming at last. For the first time coming. There was a holy man. He released us, stripped us naked to ourselves. And because of a holy man, we can wait real now, sure, intact, so gently wait and so long, for a man who is coming.
—We need not ask who he is. He is ours. He will find us and love us, won’t he, little sister?... and leave us no more.
—Like you! O my blessed baby—like you whom I was strong enough to bear, not strong enough till now to look upon—like you he is ours.
—O the black night into which you were
born, my child.
O the long pain you stood upon: it rose like
a flame from my womb you stood upon
... up, up throughout you, to your eyes
and fingers.
O the black night of fiery pain you were,
with your sucking mouth upon my naked
flesh....
We dawn together, Love, into a sleep where
with eyes open
Cooly we walk toward Day.
Fanny held her child and again she looked unwilted into sun. It was to her as if she gazed on a bright field, and there above flowers, under a sky, stood a woman sheer with a child in her arms. Her feet in grass were cool. Her hair in sky was cool. She was sheer, cool ... unburned by the fires of birth. She was born ... washed clean of the bloods of birth and born. Very cool, very sheer. So Fanny saw herself.
... Saw certain things making her sunny field of the world—as the light of her vision lay clarified in context of green thrusts running, forms sprayed and ashift over earth.