Once there was a little girl
who had a white paper crown.
She would wear her crown
and she would wear her dress
and she would dance in her room for hours. She would spin in circles,
losing track of time
and imagination.
But sometimes
she would spin too fast,
and the white paper crown
would slip over her brow,
and fly off her head
to land somewhere in her room.
One day when this happened,
she didn't stop dancing,
didn't stop dreaming,
didn't notice the crown
had landed on the hearth,
and was now
burning
in the spaces between
the ashes of the fire,
it's white now a muddy, smudged gray.