1. People in the sacred sanctuary
Offer to God the incense of their souls

2. And the souls have an audible voice
And the trembling arms of old women

3. Are like bowed oil lamps
With extinguished wicks on their peaks

4. And the prayers of the holy priest
Melt God's spirit in the souls

5. He said in a faint voice Our Father
Bestow forgiveness upon your people

6. When they trespass like the conscience of a sinner
It freezes at the word ‘forgiveness’

7. And bows its head down to the nadir
Shedding from its sick eyelid

8. Some tears white like chastity
And the cold sweat on its forehead

9. Oozes like flames from its core
Or like the melting of its repentant heart

10. And in one of the temple’s nooks
Was one possessed, wandering, inflamed

11. With a numbed, fiery gaze
From his eye it glanced

12. At the one praying, and saw the damsel
Passionate, of secret pain

13. Of a tired, wretched conscience
Of a polluted, pure passion

14. Reading in her little book
As if she read in the lines

15. Of a tormented, flaming conscience
And sometimes she raises a distracted eye

16. To the dissipating incense
In the niche's sky

17. So her breaths dissipate like it
In throes and tremors

18. Like tremors of a moth
In the air when its nuptials end

19. Or like fog at dawn
Dissolving in its soft shuddering

20. So he said “What do you fear, behold her
At times shrouded in the gloom of her turmoil”

21. And sometimes she turns away from her book
And the prayer ended

22. In the temple of God
So the masses dispersed

23. And passion remained
And worries and misery

24. In the deserted temple
Like a candle whose flame still flickers

25. Among the extinguished candles of the temple