The poem sets two worlds side by side: a cemetery in bright spring, and the ordinary lives of people who visit it. The speakers talk about newborn children loudly and laugh, as if the dead, who can't hear, were not there. Yet the mood is heavy-hearted even in all that flowering colour. Black limousines creep past dark pines, and fresh flowers pile up as signs of life, fleeting time and beauty.
Then the poem turns to daily routine: pushing a pram, deciding what to cook for dinner. These small acts seem to be how the living carry on. In the last stanzas the speaker shifts to "i" and recalls rushing into a grave for a single red flower, wanting to hold what can't be held. The comparison to plastic flowers suggests that grief can feel artificial or unable to last. But the wish grows into "secret rooms" where "she" still loves, breathless. The ending suggests that love for the dead survives privately, inside the mind.