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It was late when Martin came home, and he was dead tired but could not sleep. Black butterflies fluttered before his eyes, and thoughts and rhythms came to him as he lay and stared into the dark. He raised himself in bed and relighted the candle on his bedside table, where paper and pen were at hand as always. He felt no feverish overexcitement, only a deep weariness, which pained him but did not delude. He saw clearly where his thought wavered and needed the support of a rhythm, a bit of melody; he changed and erased, and finally a poem evolved.

You up yonder
Who are deaf and dumb!
You up yonder,
Who with your right hand squeeze
The fresh and sweetly-smelling fruit of Good
And with your left constrict
The poison-dripping maggot nest of Ill,
Looking upon them
With equal satisfaction!
You up yonder,
Whose glance is dim
With all the emptiness of space⁠—
I have a prayer to you.

One prayer, but one,
Which you can never hear
And cannot fulfill:
Teach me,
Teach me to forget
I ever met your glance.
For look!
In youthful days
I myself made a god
In mine own image,
A warm and living and aggressive god,
And on a spring day I went out
To seek for him through all the world and heavens.
Not him I found,
But you.
Not life’s divinity
But death’s I found under the mask of life.

Take the memory of the sight of you
Away, O horrible One! That memory is
A hidden sickness, is a worm that gnaws
My life-tree’s root.
I know it well, with every barren year
And every day that runs in vain
It gnaws yet closer to my being’s nerve.
It gnaws and preys upon
All that in me which is of human worth,
All that which dares, all that which wills and works;
Nor does it spare
The wondrous, brittle time-piece of the soul
Which points out Good and Ill.

Speak, you up yonder,
Is it your will
To re-create me after your own image?
Was that the meaning hidden in your word:
“He who hath seen God, he must die the death”?
O horrible One,
Have you the heart to infect
Me, a poor child of men,
With your immortal vices?