Looking up at the night sky, the speaker feels a strange kind of homesickness. The opening lines repeat themselves, as if the thought keeps circling back: our place isn't here on Earth, and some part of us feels misplaced. The poem then makes a bold claim, "they are us; for we are them." The stars aren't distant objects but something we belong to, and the sky is described as both endless and "ours."
The second half turns from longing to movement. We "fly through time," time flies through light, and light finally welcomes us "home into the night." The way these lines hand off to each other, each picking up the last word, gives them a smooth, drifting rhythm. The mood is dreamy and quietly comforting. What begins as a sense of being out of place ends as a feeling of return, so the night becomes less a darkness to fear than a place to come back to.