Protagonist
The fight was unequal, bitter and always new,
I saw how my enemy gained on me and how he drew
My strength, my youth, my soul from my shivering frame;
Yet have I not been beaten—I faced him whenever he came.
When he stabbed I watched how he did it—Poison, I studied the cup,
Flayed me with whips, I girded the bleedings up;
Hunger, imprisonment—all these I wrote in my book;
I have learned all the enemy’s purpose, I know every look.
I have conned every gesture and gotten by heart all his guile,
Yet still comes the fear and the watchfulness under my smile;
For hard as I struggle to outwit his plot to betray me,
He holds that utterest thing that can utterly slay me—
Still do I turn and defy the face of him creeping;
“Now that I know thee, thou Life, thou art locked in my keeping;
Dungeoned, thou Horror, in creative cells of desire,
Ringed in the widening rings of my aspirate fire—
I, your Creator, by steady implacable strife,
Shall give men and women a lovelier thing to call ‘Life.’”