"Then, nursing the youngest child, sits staring at her feet. To the wind she says, 'They have eaten me alive.'"
The protagonist of this poem, a mother of three, meets an old friend. Upon his departure, she quietly mourns to herself the weight of her responsibility for these children. She blames them for taking so much from her, although she doesn't wish to seem ungrateful or like a bad mother to her old friend.
"Rods of light point home the flocking
starlings to wintry tress, and turn
stone into golden ochre, locking
the orbit of my pain. . . "
Although the birds my fly home, the narrator cannot. She receives the receding light of sunset as a heavy omen. To her, the rotation of day and night brings no consolation, but represents a sentence. She expresses feeling trapped.
"the piercing absence of one face
withdrawn for ever from my sight."
This text is the conclusion of the poem, which finally gives expression to the hinted dissolution of the narrator's relationship. She feels the absence profoundly, but the very nature of absence makes her mourning difficult because she cannot even look at a memory or project her grief onto something visible.
". . .as I watched, afraid
by the fallen gun, a lonely
child who believed death clean
and final, not this obscene"
Harwood's recalls her first encounter with death. Uncertain of how the gun would injure the animal but sure it could kill it, she shoots at a barn owl. Unfortunately the bird is only wounded and continue to move in agony after the wound. To Harwood, this suffering is unbearable, especially since she, in her rash ignorance, had caused it.
