It had been a long time since Gideon had seen someone cry.
Lie still, and dusk will come
Dusk will come, gloaming-child
Lie still, in dark serenity
Dusk will come too soon… for all of us. All of us…
Her face was small, and white, and her voice was silver. Eyes like pools of dark chocolate stared into the sky, and her hair- soft, and wispy brown- stirred gently in the chilling wind.
She knelt by a gravestone, with a few limp wildflowers tucked into her wasted hand.
She didn’t fit into the crisp autumn afternoon, the blue-white sky, the orange, gold, and brown leaves twirling in eddies and scratching across the cobblestone roads. Her dress was white, flowing, trailing like waterfalls over her thin frame.

As far as feelings or thoughts go, you could make it work with this POV for the beginning, as long as you enter her mind in the very next paragraph.

There's nothing terribly remarkable about a girl who's crying by a gravestone--why should we care about her? Give us something unusual about her that will make us need to find out more.

"...wildflowers tucked into her wasted hand." What's a wasted hand?

I agree with what's been said about POV. Are you going with omniscient?

But, hey, just keep at it.

I am curious about the grave and why she's in a white dress, but I'm not quite hooked yet. Think of what's the most interesting/fantastic element of your entire story, and give me a hint of that in the opening.

Also, give her a name from the start. The unnamed protagonist wears on me.

All in all, you can take everything after the italics and shorten it to a sentence or two stating the 1. character 2. kneeling in front of a gravestone, 3. crying 4. with autumn leaves surrounding her. These four points are the essence of the passage giving a protagonist, action and setting. From there you can move directly into her motivation for crying and propel the story along.

Good Luck and Best Regards.

First, you open with a poem that I'm not qualified to judge. Mostly because I don't do poetry. I can say that it didn't really mean much to me but poetry openers are the sort of thing I skim past and look for the hook elsewhere. They usually don't have meaning until the end of a story.

"Her face was small, and white, and her voice was silver."

I think you have a grammar problems here that would be eliminated if you deleted the first "and." This is essentially a comma-separated list, the and only goes between the last two elements.

Edit: another thought occured to me. You could eliminate the commas instead. Then you are joining two things "her face was small and white" with "her voice was silver" with a conjunction.

"Eyes like pools of dark chocolate stared into the sky, and her hair- soft, and wispy brown- stirred gently in the chilling wind."

The structure of this sentence is abnormal. I don't mean to say that it's wrong, but it is so unusual that it makes me stop and read it a couple of times...which I don't think is a reaction you want here. Actually, I do spot one small problem...you need not place a comma between soft and wispy brown, I think.

"She knelt by a gravestone, with a few limp wildflowers tucked into her wasted hand."

Two things would make this sentence correct...deleting the comma or the word "with."

Ok, enough with the nit-picks. Let me give you my overall impression:

You open with a poem, but really this entire thing is poem-like in nature. Some people like it. I find it faintly distracting. I get caught up in the words rather than the meaning, but then here I'm not sure there is anything but the words and a beautifully painted description. I have no sense of person or of setting. I have a painting, and as elegant as the brushstrokes are it doesn't make me want to read the rest of the story.

There are a lot of ways you can make this an interesting hook. SOme of them are the ways that have been mentioned, but I'm seeing an awful lot of prescribing without much diagnosing. That is to say, suggestions of how to fix the story without first describing how it effected them as a reader and why they had a problem.

For example: There is a lot of discussion of POV. Let me see if I can clarify what might be the reason for suggesting this.

I think you do have a clear POV, first of all. It is either third person omniscient or possibly cinematic, but I'm leaning towards the former. In either case, these two can have similiar feelings from the start and need not be clarified immediately.

The problem is that your choice of POV is not giving us much of a character, a sense of person, a sense of purpose or of motive. WHo si this girl? We don't even know her name! One possible way to bring us into this story more fully and to get us to appreciate it is to switch to a third person limited omniscient from the POV of this girl. That would mean that we are inside her head, thinking what she thinks, feeling what she feels, knowing what she knows. (If you need more detail, just ask.)

Second, there is an assumption here that you have already tried to do such a thing -- make this third person limited omniscient. I can tell from some of the comments that don't take the omnipotent narrator into account. She would not be thinking about what she looks like and what she's wearing, true enough. But an omniscient narrator would think about that.

Another suggestion given here that I happen to agree with: give her name. The reason for this is to give us a connection to someone in the story.

Basically what I mean to say by this post is that all these suggestions pretty much stem from a lack of connectedness to anything that's going on here. It's all very distant. I didn't really feel as if the previous comments clarified that.

Now, let me try a different approach. My original critique was (aside from nits) more diagnosis, telling you what I thought was wrong, than suggestion.

That being said, I see that my opinion is not the norm. So, I would join others in recommending a strong hook in here which automatically would expand readership, but I personally would hate to see you lose the style you have set up here. (Keeping in mind, of course, that your market choices will likely be slimmer.)

The next line is "It had been a long time since Gideon had seen someone cry."

A huge thanks to everyone who commented- I really appreciate the constructive criticism. Nitpicking is good too--I'm a little bad about comma usage.

To Jaina:
Actually, it's sort of set in the future. Thanks so much for your comments!!

To Shi Magadan:
The poem at the beginning is actually a song-one that the girl is singing. Maybe I didn't make that clear enough. Any suggestions on how I could do that?
I realize that crying over a gravestone doesn't seem very remarkable, but its actually part of something a little more different than you'd expect- in later lines the reader discovers that she didn't know this person in the grave.
And I would love for you to read the whole thing, just tell me if you want me to email it to you.

To Ryan Brotman:
As I told Jaina, the first few lines are a song, not a poem- and she's singing it. That's how you know her voice is "silver".
[u]wasted[/u]- Frail and enfeebled, as from prolonged illness; emaciated. There's several definitions, but that's the one I used.
Thanks for your comments!

To Christine:
As I said in the beginning, the 14th line establishes the narrator. It's kind of odd that I'm cut off at 13, and it just happens to be on the fourteenth line, lol.
You're right about the poem not really having meaning yet- if you want a spoiler i can give you one, and if you want to read the entire first chapter i can send it to you if you like.
Thanks for your comments on the grammar- that's that type of thing MS word doesn't really catch. I appreciate your opinion on my writing, and I'll take it into consideration that it could get a little tedious to wade through.
The girl has a name, but the main character has not found out what it is yet.

Catnep:

Thanks for your comments, and I'd love a reader! If you would like me to email it to you, please give me your active email. Thanks!!

I know I'm repeating myself, but thanks to everyone!!

You capture the "lived experience" very well. Every image shapes the story.

My advice, forget the hook. As long as you know what the conflict is, and you aren't just vamping because you are in love with your own voice, I'd read on on faith.

The elegiac poem evocatively sets the stage for us. However, what follows seems like another dirgeful poem, rather than the start of a narrative. Perhaps if you pulled the poem out into a kind of epigraph, the narrative might get a better kick.

Also, there might be too great a density of colors in your opening paragraph. White, silver, chocolate, brown, blue, white, orange, gold, brown, white. Perhaps you could alternate with details from some other senses for contrast—sounds, smells. (You’ve got temperature—“chilling” and “crisp”—which is effective.)

A few stylistic notes—you have dashes after hair and brown, perhaps you pasted the text from some format where these were end-of-line hyphens. Also, you seem to separate the word “Crying” onto its own line (paragraph?) for emphasis. I think it should only be given such a dramatic spotlight if it was in contrast to the content which proceeded it—if it is a surprise or revelation. Since the story until now (because of your very effective language) evokes a sense of melancholy, “crying” is a natural culmination rather than a reversal.

Why can't this be the first line? Then we see the girl from his POV, instead of whta seems like omniscient or cinematic (or to some around here, no POV at all). It gives us a name, and frankly it draws the reader in from line one. From here, you could launch into the exact description you have except now it's got a context.

I would add ", singing softly." after "wasted hand", move the song to after the two new words and put the song into quotes. That way we can watch her with Gideon for a few seconds before we hear her singing.