Everyone in the photograph is having a wonderful time except one girl. Gerald Locklin's speaker looks at a picture of a circus and ignores the spectacle. His eye goes to the one child who isn't laughing, a "ragamuffin" with an "oval face" that is "shocked." Her prettier sister sleeps on her shoulder, and the other children have "large open mouths." Halfway through, the poem stops describing and starts speaking to her: "child, i have seen it too." What looked like a caption becomes a confession. The speaker recognises the girl's expression because it has been his own, and he warns that it "will not go away."
The poem is built on that turn. The first eight lines are observation, with the girl in the third person ("her own small mouth," "her eyes"). Then comes the direct address, and the pronouns shift to "we" and "our shoulders." The speaker moves from watching her to standing beside her. The title helps here. A photograph freezes a single instant, and the poem argues that for some people the frozen instant becomes a permanent identity. The line "we will go through life looking like pumpkins" makes the point: a face caught in one moment of shock turns into the face you are known by.
Locklin builds the image of her mouth carefully. The sentence "her own small mouth is turned down like that occasional / jack-o-lantern one sees" breaks on the word "occasional," so the comparison arrives slightly late, with a little comic drag. It also reverses a convention. Jack-o-lanterns are almost always carved to grin, so the sad one is the rare exception, just as she is in the group. Her eyes are "turned down at the corners," and her breath is "caught … like a fluttering sparrow." The sparrow is small, nervous and alive. The pumpkin is round and hollow, and it is a joke. The poem keeps both: the tender image of a frightened bird and the slightly absurd image of a vegetable face. That mix gives the poem its tone, tender and funny at once, with the humor guarding something sore.
The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed metre. It is written in lowercase and mostly without punctuation, and the lines fall like casual speech. The lowercase "i" feels modest, as if the speaker were mumbling an aside. The sentences are plain, even flat ("it will not go away"), which suits someone admitting a fact rather than performing sadness. There is also a quiet contrast between "large open mouths" and her "small mouth … turned down." The others are loud and outward, and she is closed and inward. Calling the other children's laughter "hysteria" is telling. The speaker doesn't trust the crowd's joy, and he treats it as something close to panic, the opposite of her honest gasp.
The sleeping sister deserves a closer look. In the photograph she is simply a burden on a shoulder. In the prediction she grows into "the prettier person asleep on our shoulder," and the word "person" suggests an adult who has moved on to a different kind of life. The phrase "asleep on our shoulders" suggests that the sensitive ones are those who stay awake while others rest. They carry the weight and see what the sleepers and the laughers miss. We aren't told what the girl is shocked by, and the poem never explains it. That leaves her shock as a general condition of awareness instead of a reaction to one event.
The ending is deliberately unresolved. The repeated question, "how come you always look like a pumpkin?", is first asked by "the other kids" and then by the person closest to us. It is a small cruelty, and the repetition makes it hurt more, because the last speaker is someone who should understand. There is no consolation, and the poem ends where the loneliness is deepest.
The poem is significant because it refuses the sentimental view of childhood as uncomplicated delight. It finds in an ordinary snapshot a lasting kind of isolation, and it says so with jokes instead of solemnity. The humor doesn't undercut the sadness. It shows how people survive a sadness they can't fix, by naming it, laughing at its absurd shape, and offering the child a companion in "i have seen it too."