The title, "like the night sky", is a comparison with its first half missing, and the poem's fifteen short lines supply the rest. A young child's eyes, wide open on a world still new, are likened to the dark sky. Because the child laughs and smiles "throughout the time" it watches the night, the sky becomes the first place wonder is practised. Then the poem turns. As the child grows, "that beautiful night / becomes something / strange," and years later the glow "will / disappear." Its central idea is that wonder is not permanent. The sky stays the same, and what changes is the person looking at it.
The opening simile is stranger and richer than it first looks. A dark sky is an odd thing to compare to eyes, but the image suggests dark, wide pupils, open and taking everything in. The comparison also loops back on itself: the sky is like the child's eyes, and the child's eyes are busy looking at the sky. Looker and looked-at nearly merge, and the poem treats that merging as the happiest state it describes. Once the child "grows," the two come apart.
The form follows the same drift. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, only free verse that moves by line break rather than pattern. Many lines end on a small, unfinished word: "like the," "beauty of the," "throughout the," "seeing the." Each break leaves the reader hanging for a noun, much as a child's attention hangs on the next marvel. Punctuation is sparse, and the sentence about growing up has no comma at all: "…the darken sky as that child grows that beautiful night becomes something strange." The run-on blurs the moment of growing into the moment of loss, so the change seems to happen without anyone deciding it. Then comes the line break after "something," which leaves "strange" alone at the start of the next line. The word lands with a small jolt, which is how estrangement often feels.
The key words are chosen with care. "Beauty" and "beautiful" appear three times, in "the beauty of the world," "that beautiful night," and "the beautiful plants," and the repetition makes it the poem's anchor. The third use comes after the glow has gone, so beauty is still named but no longer felt. "Strange" is a quiet choice. The night does not turn frightening or ugly, only unfamiliar, and the poem leaves the cause unstated, as though growing up needs no villain. "Glow" is a light word in a poem about darkness, and it puts the warmth in the child's seeing rather than in the stars. The tense also shifts: the child's joy is in the present, and the loss is predicted with "years will pass." The speaker seems to look ahead with regret at what the child cannot yet know.
The ending is the hardest part to read. "The glow it once had / to that child will / disappear forgetting to / shade the beautiful / plants." The "it" could be the sky's glow or the child's, and the subject of "forgetting" is unclear. One reading, which is an inference and not a certainty, is that the night itself "forgets" to shade the plants, so the world loses its tenderness. Another is that the grown child forgets to care for living things. Either way, the poem's gaze has moved from the huge sky to small plants on the ground, as though the adult's attention has dropped from wonder to a diminished, earthbound view. That the final image is ambiguous may be intentional, since it leaves the reader with the feeling of something slipping away without a clear reason.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It takes a familiar experience, the loss of childhood wonder, and gives it a clear arc: a simile, a turn at "strange," and a fading. The text has small slips ("eyes if," "smile," "darken"), but a reader can correct them without losing the sense, and the roughness suits the poem's plain, unguarded voice. The name attached to the poem tells us nothing about its background, so everything depends on what is on the page. What is there is a quiet, honest question for any reader: when did the night sky last look like a child's eyes to you?