When the speaker’s eyes “labor to midwife / this moment out all the way,” it is a concurrent working toward and submission to the full flowering or birth of the beautiful day, yes, but also of beauty’s witness. The beautiful cresting sun being born, or seeing it as such, makes the witnessing a kind of birth. That is, the beholding of the beautiful midwifes oneself into life. It makes one be newborn.
But it also reminds us that proper witness—which is looking, yes, but also feeling, attention, and attending—is labor. Come seriously to the page, Finney is saying. Pay attention. Do your work. Because looking is a generative act; it is a birth; looking, by which I really mean seeing, makes the world. This witness, black-eyed, is labor, and labor is birth. And labor, let me say it again, means work.