Denise Levertov - Childhood's End lyrics

The world alive with love, where leaves tremble, systole and diastole marking miraculous hours, is burning round the children where they lie deep in caressing gra**es all the day, and feverish words of once upon a time a**ail their hearts with languor and with swans. The pebble's shadow quivers in the sun; the light grows low, and they become tuned to the love and d**h of day, the instruments of life and dream, as Syrinx flying in fear from unimaginable sound, became music's green channel; then they rise and go up the inevitable stony slope to search untraveled valleys for the land of wonder and of loss; but on that hill they find it, wound about them like a cloud. Some are too much at home in the role of wanderer, watcher, listener; who by lamplit doors that open only to another's knock, commune with shadows and are happier with ghosts than living guests in a warm house. They drift about the darkening city squares, coats blown in evening winds and fingers feeling familiar holes in pockets, thinking: Life has always been a counterfeit, a dream where dreaming figures danced behind the gla**. Yet as they work, or absently stand at a window letting a tap run and the plates lie wet, while the bright rain softly shines upon slates, they feel the whole of life is theirs, the music, “colour, and warmth, and light”; hands held safe in the hands of love; and trees beside them dark and gentle, growing as they grow a part of the world with fire and house and child. The undertone of all their solitude Is the unceasing question, “Who am I? A shadow's image on the rainy pavement, walking in wonder past the vivid windows, a half-contented guest among my ghosts? Or one who, imagining light, air, sun, can now take root in life, inherit love?”