One small girl on a summer night
looked up at the sky so wide,
and saw the stars come out to play,
a thousand thousand, side by side.
"I will count them all," she said, and she began. "One, two, three…" But the more she counted, the more there seemed to be, until the numbers ran out of her head and scattered like spilled sugar across the dark.
She counted past a hundred. She counted past a lot. The stars just kept on twinkling, more than she had thought. For every star she counted, ten more seemed to bloom, quiet and patient and endless, filling up the room of night.
At last she sighed and stopped, and lay back in the cool soft grass, and simply looked.
And lying there, not counting now, the girl began to see what counting could not show her: how the stars made shapes and rivers and roads of light, how some were bright and some were shy, how one fell slow across the sky and left a silver thread behind. The stars were not for counting, she saw. They were for wondering at.
Then she found one star, just one, that seemed to shine for her alone — not the brightest, not the biggest, but warm and steady, low in the east. "Hello," she whispered up to it. And though it could not speak, of course, it seemed to twinkle just a little brighter, as if it had been waiting all along for someone to look its way.
The longer she looked, the more she found. There — those stars made the shape of a great bright bear, walking slowly across the north. And there — a hunter, and a crown, and a long bright river spilling from one edge of the sky clear to the other. People long ago had drawn these pictures, joining star to star with stories, and now she was drawing them too, with nothing but her wondering eyes. There was no end to what the sky could show a girl who simply looked.
So she gave up counting, one by one,
the countless stars above —
for some things are too vast to count,
like the night sky, and like love.
She watched until her eyes grew heavy and the grass grew cool with dew, and then she went inside to bed, her head still full of light. And every night from that night on, she did not try to count the stars. She only looked, and wondered, and let the wide and shining sky tuck her gently into sleep.