Well said Janie! I'm not sure what's worse... being alone... or having 'absent parents' in a house filled with people. In any case the emptiness, heartache and abandonment feel the same.

chilling. almost seems as if the child is like those children in "A Christmas Carol" named "want" and "ignorance" - i feel the hopelessness inside the child...but the redemption in all of this...is that that lone child...still has hope admist hopelessness. At first when i read it i thought of a child alone in the woods outside...then reading further, i see the cold outside is really inside this child's so called "home". The emptiness and frigid emotion shown through in this poem. Sad, wonderful and enlightening. This poem is great on so many levels and I really mean that and not to sound gratuitous... it really is. Without the "house" concept...this could even apply to abandoned animals or could symbolically represent abandoned hope. But I love the idea that this is about a child. Perhaps no particular child...but one child without hope that can represent so many with hope that has been abandoned, forgot, uncared for.