I am the Slow Emerger:
Patience and wait for me,
Nor be afraid that I will fail you--
You holder of fair morning heights--
You dancing with the rosy dawn!
It has been long and hard for me,
This task of slow emergence from the clod.
Brute-shapes still prowl about me in the shadows,
Their fangs are sometimes fastened to my feet;
So that I cannot walk from pain of them,
So that I halt and cry out--lonely in the night!
Sometimes I see you, Woman--
You the watchful, waiting one of ages--
You with the dawn and godlike--
You past all torment that I know--
You the understanding.
Sometimes I see you in a shaft of light
Smiting the mists of valleys where I call,
Dividing them as with a two-edged sword
Swung by an angel! In that vision
Rage of tusk and tooth and fang
Falls like the waves in their wind-drifted foam
Upon the scarlet laughter of wild poppies!
I have deceived you;
You in turn have punished me--
Have punished me with a mere semblance of yourself:
A figure, rose-lipped, white fleshed,
With wild witcheries of ample breasts--
Limbs smooth and dimpled as for kisses--
A dear and tender fiction of yourself;
A fiction of yourself that did escape me,
Leaped up to claim those hills remote from me
Until I learned man must not chain a woman's soul!
O Woman, wait for me--
Be patient; for I strive
Out of the shadow
Where the brute
Still fastens with his fang
My bleeding feet--
My weary, stumbling feet:
Nor be afraid that I will fail you--
You holder of far morning heights--
You dancing with the dawn!