Childlike Faith In Childhood's End
Existence is a stage on which we passa sleepwalk trick for mind and heart:it's hopeless, I know,but onward I must goand try to make a startat seeing something more than day to daysurvival, chased by final deathif I believed this the sumof the life to which we've come,I wouldn't waste my breathSomehow, there must be more. There was a timewhen more was felt than knownbut now, entrenched inside my sett,in light more mundane,thought rattles round my brain:we live, we die...and yet?
In the beginning there was order and destinybut now that path has reached the border,and on our kneesis no way to face the future, whatever it be.Though the forces which hold us in placelast through eons in unruffled gracewe, too, wear the face of creation.
As anti-matter sucks and pulses periodicallythe bud unfolds, the bloom is dead,all space is living history.It seems as though time must betray us,yet we're aliveand though I see no God to save us,yetl we survivethrough the centuries of progresswhich don't get us very far.All illusion! All is bogus -we don't yet know what we are...Laughing, hoping, praying, joking, Son of Man!with lowered eyes but lifting hearts,we're grains of sandand though, in time, the seamay claim us for its ownwe are the rocks which root the future -on us it grows!
We might not be there to share itif eternity's a jestbut I think that I can bear itif the next life is the best.Even if there is a heaven when we die,endless bliss would be as meaningless as the liethat always comes as answer to the question,"Why do we see through the eyes of creation?"
Adrift without a course,it's very lonely here,our only conjecturewhat lies behind the dark.Still, I find I can cling to a lifeline,think of a lifetime which means morethan my own one -dreams of a grander thing than we are.Time and Space hang heavy on my shoulders:when all life is over who can sayno mutated force shall remain?Though the towers of the city are deniedto we men of claystill we know we shall scalethe heights some day.Frightened in the silence -frightened, but thinking very hard,let us make computations of the stars.
Older, wiser, sadder, blinder, watch us run:faster, longer, harder, stronger, now it comes:colour blisters, image splinters gravitatetowards the centre, in final splendour disintegrate,The universe now beckonsand Man, too, must take His place...just a few last fleeting secondsto wander in the waste,and the children who were ourselves move on,reincarnation stills its now perfected song,and at last we are free of the bonds of creation.
All the jokers and gaolers, all the junkiesand slavers too,all the throng who have danced a merry tune -human we can all be,but Humanity we must rise above,in the name of all faith and hope and love.There's a time for all pilgrims,and a time for the fakers too,there's a time when we all will stand aloneand nude,naked to the galaxies -naked, but clothed in the overview...as we reach Childhood's End we must start anew.
And though dark is the highway,and the peak's distance breaks my heart,for I never shall see it, still I play my part,believing that what waits for usis the cosmos compared to the dust of the past...In the death of mere humans life shall start