I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Kids are natural-born poets and philosophers.

They want to know everything about life and death and time,

so many questions about time.

They want to know about space and the deep sea and all of life's mysteries.

Conversations with children tend to be light on small talk and heavy on big talk.

Today's poem addresses a child,

a child full of questions about the world.

It reminds me that as parents,

we don't need to have the answers,

and we don't need to pretend to have them. Instead, we can listen, stay open,

and honor our kids' curiosity and wonder the poets and philosophers that they are.

The Long Now by Robin Beth Share.

The sky is a map of questions.

What burns? How long?

Where is the middle without an edge? You ask, and my answers are never enough.

When you were small, we lived by milk thirst and sleep, outside of time and the shifting blues, unaware of any world beyond the two of us.

But now, you point upward and every question bears another. How bright, how many, can we live out there? I warm your hands with mine and tell you how

even stars can be cast out or mistaken. In the winter triangle, the red giant is beetle juice,

a runaway in a stellar wake of heat and wind, and soon to supernova.

Just above the pines is the evening star, which is also the morning star, and not a star at all, but a cloudy planet, double-seen, so close to us.

Imagine me in Ohio and you on the ocean, a pole to the other in half dark, where the strongest light is Venus,

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