A Woman’s Reading:

“The sentences of the priest are blind and deaf, bloodless, veinless. A breath — even one breath — as a sign of life there is not in the phrases of the priest. Each phrase is a stone hurled into empty space, forever, forever, forever turning, that wants to carry me off with it like dead prey. Carry me off with it in a deadly fall...” The hour has passed midnight. Behind the woman’s curtain — daughter, mother, wife, friend, comrade, beloved — the sky has the color of near-dawn: a milky indigo... Having opened the window, the woman closes the book of war and darkness...