Poem For Children
Dying Young

Graced with a small passage
into color and weather
you leave, unburdened,
that extended domain,
the stretches into larger pains
and lonelier pleasures, and
a newer strangeness, so large
it's made of everyone's undoing,
will lead you toward the loveliest
fires as you work your way into
a brighter darkness toward the
source of all stars that would not
let you stay the other way and you
turn and leave and stop and enter,
and finally last.