Childhoods End by Denise Levertov 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 grasses all the day,
and feverish words of once upon a time
assail 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 death 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 glass.
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?”