Three asterisks stand where a title should be, which suits a poem so concerned with things that resist naming. Maria gives us twelve short lines, a speaker searching for someone's "presence," and a question that will not go away: is the end as dark as the night sky?
The first stanza has an unusual grammar. "Dark as the night sky, / I search for your presence" attaches the simile to the speaker, not to the sky. The speaker has become the darkness, an emptiness shaped like the thing it looks into. The next phrase hangs over "I" in the same way: "Touched by stars." Stars are tiny, distant points of light, so "touched" is a surprising verb. It gives physical closeness to something unreachable, much like the "presence" being sought, which is felt rather than seen. The stanza ends on "I only want to stay." The word "only" makes the wish sound small, almost childlike, yet it carries the whole poem. The speaker wants to hold still, though the poem never says where or with whom. That vagueness is deliberate, and nothing in the text tells us who "you" is.
The second stanza turns from the night to time. "Distantly..." stands alone, a single adverb trailing off like a gaze toward the horizon. Then comes the poem's longest line, "In the comfort of our beginning," which looks back, while the next line looks forward: "Further ahead waits our end." Neither line ends with punctuation, so beginning and end run together in one breath. The pronoun matters too. The beginning and end are "our" shared ones, so this is the shape of a story told by two people. "Waits" gives the end a patient, almost human presence, like someone standing further down a road. Then comes the poem's only direct question: "Is it as dark as that night sky?" The word "that" points back to the opening simile. What began as a description of the speaker's mood has become a fear about the future, and the poem closes a circle on itself.
The last stanza tries to answer with a proverb-like line in quotation marks: "Tomorrow counts for its own." The quotation marks make it sound like a mantra, something said aloud to steady oneself. "That's what I tell myself" admits as much, since it is persuasion, not belief. The next line begins with a lowercase "but," as though the doubt interrupts before the comfort can settle, and "wonder...." trails off into four dots, an ellipsis with a full stop pressed onto it.
The final line is the cleverest. "How tomorrow shall end" is no longer a question, because there is no question mark and the inquiry has become indirect, quieter and more resigned. "Shall" sounds formal and fated. Most importantly, "end" returns from the second stanza. The mantra was meant to shrink the future to a single manageable day, but that day has an ending too. Judging by the imagery, tomorrow ends the way every day does, in night, so the dark sky comes back. The speaker has made the fear smaller but has not escaped it.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and plain, and the pauses do much of the work. There is a soft hiss of s-sounds in "search," "stars" and "stay," like a hushed voice in a dark room. The ellipses and the missing punctuation make the poem feel as if it is being thought rather than composed.
What makes it worth reading is its restraint and honesty. It never says whether the "you" is lost, distant or simply loved, and it never tells us what the dark means. Readers can bring their own absence to it. It also refuses an easy consolation. Most of us have told ourselves not to worry about tomorrow, and most of us know how little that sentence can do once the thought has arrived. Maria ends on that unfinished feeling and leaves the question open.