The Light Through the Window

For Michelle
 
I stop by a normal house on a normal day
In a normal street, and my soul is swept away
By a sight too strange and too commonplace to say.

The living room window is open, the curtain furled,
The door of the room is ajar, and through it is hurled
From a further window, the light from another world.

Another world, which is mine; but to see it plain
I must see it at second-hand, through a window pane,
From a window outside, in a place I cannot remain.

The light from that window lit up all the tales I was told
Of the adult world, before I was ten years old.
By this light Keats saw Homer's realms of gold.

This is the daylight, the cold and eternal gleam,
That lights all the faraway pictures of childhood that seem
To lie on the border of memory and dream.

It shines through proverbs and stories and street vendors' cries,
Through the flames of a Halloween bonfire, and painted skies,
And purest of all in the light of a lover's eyes.

It is gone, it is gone...and yet it can never be gone.
We will find it again, not too distant, but stumbled upon;
The light from the New Jerusalem, leading us on.