Most poems about the night sky make us feel small. "off in the night" does something stranger. It uses the stars to tell us we are in the wrong place, then carries us, in nine short lines, to the right one. It is a poem about homesickness, except that the home being missed is overhead.
The opening lines work by repetition. "when we look to the stars" appears twice, word for word, like a thought the speaker keeps returning to. Each return sharpens it. The first time we reach a plain conclusion: "we know our place isn't here." The second time the idea gets odder and more intimate: "a piece is known to be misplaced." Notice what happens to the verb. "We know" becomes "is known," as if the feeling no longer needs a person to hold it and has become simply true. The word "piece" suggests a jigsaw, though the poem never says whether the missing piece is part of us or whether we are the piece that has landed in the wrong box. That ambiguity is useful, because both readings express the same ache. The sounds also do some of the work. "Place," "piece" and "misplaced" echo one another, so the idea of displacement is built into the language itself.
Line five is the hinge: "for they are us; for we are them." It holds the poem's only semicolon, and the sentence is a mirror, with "they are us" reversed into "we are them." The word "for" makes it an explanation: we feel misplaced because we are made of the same stuff as what we're looking at. Readers who know that the elements in our bodies were forged in stars will hear that science here, though the poem leaves it as a feeling rather than a fact. The next line, "the sky is endless and the sky is ours," pulls two ideas together that normally resist each other, infinity and ownership. Even the sound joins in, since "us" returns inside "ours."
Then comes "now," and the poem changes gear. Until here we have been looking, in a habitual present. After it, we move. The last three lines pass their key words along like a relay: "time" ends one line and begins the next, and "light" does the same. The idiom "time flies" is also turned inside out. Time usually flies past us, but here "we fly through time, / and time flies through light." Judging by the imagery, this may nod to the fact that starlight is old light, so that looking at the stars is already a kind of travel through time. That is an inference, but it fits the way the lines run time and light together.
The ending lands on the poem's only true end-rhyme, "light" and "night." The earlier lines are loose and unrhymed, so the rhyme arrives only when the speaker does. It also resolves a paradox. Light and night are normally opposites, and night is where people get lost. Here light "greets us home," like a host at a door, and the dark is the destination. The lines also lengthen as they go. The repeated opening lines are six syllables, and the last line stretches to nine, so the poem widens as it approaches the sky.
The title adds a final turn. "off in the night" can mean departed, but "off" also means not quite right, which matches "misplaced." The title says "in the night," while the last line says "into the night." That one extra word, "into," is the whole journey. The title names where the poem ends up.
I don't know anything reliable about the writer, so I'll stay with the page. The handle "mayothegalileo" echoes Galileo, the astronomer, which fits the stargazing, but that is only a suggestion. What the page does show is a poem in lowercase, with no full stops and almost entirely short, everyday words. Its large ideas sound like thoughts said aloud at night, and with no closing punctuation the last line seems to drift out into the dark it describes.
That is where the poem's significance lies. The usual feeling of cosmic awe is loneliness, the sense of being a speck. This poem keeps the vastness but removes the fear. The endless sky becomes ours, and the distance becomes a way back. It offers a gentle answer to anyone who has ever felt out of place: perhaps the feeling is not a flaw but a memory of where we come from.