Her new-born child she holdeth, but feels within her heart
It is not hers, but his who can out-bid her in the mart;
And through the gloomy midnight her prayer goes upon high,
"God grant my little helpless one in helplessness may die!"
"If she must live to womanhood, oh may she never know,
Uncheered by mother's happiness, the mother's depth of woe!
And may I lie within my grave before that day I see,
When she sits, as I am sitting, with a slave-child on her knee!"
The little arms steal upward, and then upon her breast
She feels the brown and velvet hands that never are at rest;
No sense of joy they waken, but thrills of bitter pain,—
She thinks of him who counteth o'er the gold those hands shall gain.
Then on her face she looketh, but not as mother proud,
And seeth how her features, as from out a dusky cloud,
Are tenderly unfolding, far softer than her own,
And how upon the rounded cheek a fairer light is thrown;
And she trembles in her agony, and on her prophet heart
There drops a gloomy shadow down, that never can depart,—
She cannot look upon that face, where, in the child's pure bloom,
Is writ with such dread certainty the woman's loathsome doom.
She cannot bear to know her child must be as she hath been,
Yet she sees but one deliverance from infamy and sin,—
And so she cries at midnight, with exceeding bitter cry,
"God grant my little helpless one in helplessness may die!"