Nothing is less empty than the sun, which is why the title "Empty Suns" works like a small puzzle. The speaker says they wouldn't paint a thousand suns, because "all they'd be is empty." The condition is "Unless they are for everyone." Quantity alone means nothing. A thousand suns made for no one are a thousand hollow circles, while one that is shared has a purpose. Then the speaker backs off even from that rule: "But I guess one is plenty." The central idea is that value comes from generosity and sharing, not from how much is made. The poem is also content with enough.
The sun itself sits behind this argument. A painted sun has to be offered to people, but the real sun already belongs to everyone, and nobody needs to be handed it. The poem's last move is to stop making and start looking: "There they are in the sky." The pronoun is odd, though. After "one is plenty," why is it "they"? One reading is that the speaker is gesturing at the stars, which really are suns. Another is that the imagined suns have quietly appeared in the sky after all. The poem doesn't settle it, and that uncertainty keeps the ending open.
The grammar tells a story of its own. The poem begins in the conditional ("wouldn't," "they'd be"), the language of imagining, and ends in the plain present ("There they are"). It moves from what the speaker might do to what is simply there. The word "for" also changes jobs. In line two it means "because," and in line three it means "intended for someone": "for everyone." The same small word moves from explaining to giving. The speaker says "I" only twice, in lines one and four, and both times softly ("I wouldn't," "I guess"). In the last two lines the "I" disappears and the sky takes over. The poem also has no punctuation at all, so it reads like a thought spoken aloud and corrected as it goes.
The sound shapes the meaning too. The first four lines keep to roughly seven or eight syllables, in a steady, walking rhythm. "I wouldn't paint a thousand suns" is close to a clean iambic line. The last two lines shrink to about six syllables each, as if the poem were demonstrating its own claim that less is enough. Lines two, four and six end in rhymes or near-rhymes with soft, unstressed endings: "empty," "plenty," "pennies." The first two are opposites, and the rhyme sets lack and abundance side by side. Lines one and three echo each other more quietly ("suns," "everyone"). Line five, "sky," breaks the pattern, and the one line that looks upward is the one that escapes the rhyme.
The final image is the most interesting choice. Calling stars or suns "new pennies" brings the cosmos down to something you could hold. A penny is round and flat, as a painted sun would be. It is copper-warm, close to the colour of a drawn sun. And it is ordinary, something that sits in everyone's pockets. The word "new" suggests shine before the wear of use. There is a slight sting in the comparison, since pennies are worth very little. That keeps the ending from being sentimental. The sun is bright, but the speaker sees it modestly. The vocabulary is quietly economic throughout, with "thousand," "empty," "plenty" and "pennies" all belonging to counting and spending. The poem is about wealth in the end: what makes something worth having, and when you have enough.
That is what makes it worth reading. In six lines it takes a big question, whether making more means giving more, and answers it without lecturing. The hedge in "I guess" keeps the tone humble, and the poem ends by pointing at the sky instead of announcing a moral. It suggests that the best thing we can offer is something shared, and that sometimes it has been there all along.