Childhood in this poem is a game played with the sky. The speaker presses their hands to a window and treats the sun as a hide-and-seek opponent who winks through the treetops, always letting them get "oh so close" before darting away. Later, "on wheels," they race the moon and stick out their tongue as they overtake her. The window and the speed suggest a moving car, where the sun and moon really do seem to follow along. The speaker remembers believing that the sky was keeping up on purpose, and the child's promise to find the sun "tomorrow, just you wait!" carries all that confidence.
The form is free verse. There is no rhyme scheme and no steady meter, and the long, loose lines read like someone talking. The music comes from repetition instead. "I used to pretend" is followed by "I used to race," and in the second half those openings give way to a run of "Maybe"s. This shift is the poem's turning point. The early sections state things with total certainty, but once the speaker grows up, everything becomes a guess.
The loss of the sun and the loss of friends are tied together by one word. The sun is "drifting" away as the car speeds on, and then the speaker watches friends "drift away." Nothing dramatic happens, and nobody is accused. The speaker even admits they would have "taken a bullet" for those friends, a hyperbole that sounds like adolescent loyalty at full volume. Meanwhile something else is taking shape. The speaker lets their fingers "feel the emotions I refused to hide from" and lets "the ink bleed through the cracks and imperfections." Writing is presented as an act of exposure, and the verb "refused" suggests it was a choice.
The three "maybe" explanations are the most revealing passage. The first is flattering: the friends "couldn't keep up with what I was becoming." The second is gentler, since perhaps they simply found "other innocent kids to race after." The third turns the question inward and suggests that the sun and moon themselves had changed. The speaker never settles on one answer, and that restlessness is more convincing than a tidy reason would be.
The poem's language changes along with its subject. The childhood images are small and physical: hair "flapping erratically like the wings of a moth," a tongue stuck out, the moon left "to bite the dust." The grown-up versions are ceremonial. The sun becomes "a majestic figure of glory, a muse," and the moon a "regal queen" in "violet robes glittering with jewels of the sky." The speaker has gone from playing with the sky to writing about it, and the vocabulary of crowns and robes shows that. The thesis arrives in economic terms: "innocent simplicity was the cost of complex poetry," followed by a doubtful "fair trade-off." The poem is itself an example of the exchange. Its richest, most ornate lines come after the playfulness has gone.
The ending is the most interesting part. The sun's "gold against blue" is "burned into the back of my eyelids," like the afterimage left by staring at something too bright. The speaker can still see the splendor but can no longer touch it. The last line, "How foolish was I to assume that they were every bit as glorious as they seemed," is open to two readings. It might mean the grand, poetic sun and moon were never as magnificent as they looked, and that something was lost in the promotion. Or it might be a self-reproach for believing that glory could replace friendship. Either way, the speaker ends in doubt instead of triumph.
The poem is worth reading because it questions its own ambition. Writing about growing up often turns into simple nostalgia, or else proudly celebrates the artist who outgrew childish things. Here the speaker is unsure that the exchange was worth it. The poem also treats the sun and moon as characters who change as the speaker changes, which gives the loss a physical presence. The title's phrase "growing out of" suggests clothes that no longer fit, and the poem leaves open whether the speaker has grown into something better or only into something bigger.