The speaker
Physically, the first-person speaker of this poem is taking out the trash and recycling to the street and looking at the night sky. Mentally, she begins thinking deeply about how humans can embody our highest potential for goodness. She compares herself to a nest of spiders, implying a sort of restlessness and effort that is mostly directed inwards at herself and her home. She does not allow herself to feel confined by her restlessness, the winter, her suburban setting, or the fact that she forgets most of the constellations. Instead, she finds inspiration in her connection to stars and in imagining better futures for the world. Her visionary ideas focus on altruism, justice, and activism: most broadly, the desire to protect the earth and other people.
The speaker's husband
This poem features a second-person "you," with whom the speaker is admiring the night sky. This companion is not named or identified in the poem, but in the context of the book The Carrying, is most likely Ada Limón's husband Lucas. When the speaker is looking at Orion, her husband is the one who says they should learn more constellations. In this way, he acts as a foil to the speaker's romanticism, and actually helps launch her on the train of thought that carries the rest of the poem. After this moment, he is mostly absorbed into the poem's collective "we" rather than being addressed directly.
Winter
In line 2, winter is personified as pressing a hand against everyone's backs. This cold and somber presence helps set up the poem's initial tone of darkness and confinement, from which the speaker breaks free in her ambitious, inspiring ideas later.
People in the future
In the final two lines of the poem, the speaker imagines people in some unspecified future, "when all of this is over." Like the present speaker and her husband, these future people are also imagined rolling their trash bins to the curb, but instead of looking up at stars, they will be pointing to the greatness of the speaker and people who live now. This final image inspires readers to act in a way that future generations will admire.
