Where Do They Go?

Where do they go, those children asleep?
Do they roost, or do angels put them on shelves?
Or do they go home, to some place they keep
locked far away from us and themselves,
Or an alternate universe? In, out, up, down?
Into a not-place, past care and past fear?
Past love and past tired, past smile, yawn and frown
Into subtracted space, full of not-here?

And where do they go, the dead?
We say we can’t know where they go,
just that they’re gone. But the crow
says, “There is more to know that you don’t know”
and says, “Better ask instead,
where do we go, when dead?”