Tristan H. Globes imagines a landfill world called The Valley of Decay, where a little boy and a little girl are guided, almost like children in a fable, through ruin. The setting is deliberately ugly: dead grass, heaps of rubbish, dead squirrels, flies, a mountain of tire rubber. Even the single cloud has come to this place "where clouds come to die."
The voice is a strange mix of cheerful and grim. It speaks like a storyteller addressing children, with repeated calls of "Little Boy, Little Boy," yet it describes filth in detail and treats the rain as a swarm of flies. That odd gaiety makes the mood unsettling at first.
Slowly, though, the tone shifts. The speaker urges the children to cry, to keep climbing, and to pluck a bright pink flower, and the phrase "not all hope is gone" returns. By the end, the cloud that "came to die" has turned into one that comes "to defy." The poem suggests that small acts of defiance can bring life back, even to a wasteland.