Children of darkness got no wings,
This we know we got no wings,
Stay, dramatic figures, tethered down
By weight of cloth and fact,
Crystal or funeral, got no hope
For us that knows misventure
Only as wrong; but shan’t the genius fail,
Gliding, rope-dancing, is his fancy,
Better nor us can’t gainsay walking,
Who’ll break our necks upon the pavement
Easier than he upon the ice.
For we are ordinary men,
Sleep, wake, and sleep, eat, love, and laugh,
With wide, dry mouths and eyes,
Poor, petty vermin,
Stink of cigarettes and armpits,
Cut our figures, and retreat at night
Into a double or a single bed,
The same thoughts in our head.
We are ordinary men,
Bred in the dark behind the skirting-board,
Crying with hungry voices in our nest.

Children of darkness got no wings,
This we know, we got no wings,
Stay, in a circle chalked upon the floor,
Waiting all vainly this we know.

We have bit no forbidden apple,
Eve and I,
Yet the splashes of day and night
Falling round us no longer dapple
The same Eden with purple and white.

This is our own still valley
Our Eden, our home,
But day shows it vivid with feeling
And the pallor of night does not tally
With dark sleep that once covered its ceiling.

My little red heifer, to-night I looked in her eyes,
—She will calve to-morrow:
Last night when I went with the lantern, the sow was grabbing her litter
With red, snarling jaws: and I heard the cries
Of the new-born, and after that, the old owl, then the bats that flitter.

And I woke to the sound of the wood-pigeons, and lay and listened,
Till I could borrow
A few quick beats of a wood-pigeon’s heart, and when I did rise
The morning sun on the shaken iris glistened,
And I saw that home, this valley, was wider than Paradise.

I learned it all from my Eve
This warm, dumb wisdom.
She’s a finer instructress than years;
She has taught my heart-strings to weave
Through the web of all laughter and tears.

And now I see the valley
Fleshed all like me
With feelings that change and quiver:
And all things seem to tally
With something in me,
Something of which she’s the giver.