A two-year-old tells strangers in a park that his father is coming home today, and by the end of twelve lines the reader wishes he would stop. That reversal is the method of Bella Catten's "Waiting": a bright, bouncing voice set against a truth nobody says aloud. The boy is sure his father will arrive on an army bus. The people around him, and the reader, learn from his mother's face that he will not.
The central idea is the gap between a child's certainty and an adult's knowledge, and the cruelty of a hope that cannot be corrected. The poem never states what has happened to the father. It says only that the boy is "waiting for what would never come." Leaving the loss unnamed makes it heavier, because we have to supply it ourselves.
The form helps with this. The poem runs in rhymed couplets (two/blue, say/today, us/bus, letter/better), and the lines trot along with roughly four beats each, loosely and a little breathlessly. "Hey! My daddy's comin' home today" sounds like a skipping chant. The rhymes are simple, even obvious, and that suits the boy, whose world is tidy and where "letter" fits "better" as neatly as the sounds do. Because the music is so cheerful, the sadness is easy to miss at first. When the final couplet closes on "some" and "come," the click of the rhyme sounds like a door shutting.
Catten gives the child convincing small touches of speech. The dropped "g" in "comin'" and the pointing "that army bus" make him sound as if he can already see the vehicle. "Fighting for us" sounds borrowed from adults, a phrase he has heard repeated rather than one he understands. His most painful line is "I used to miss him, but this will make it all better," because "used to" treats the longing as already over. He thinks the hard part is behind him. A child this young speaking so fluently is not strictly realistic, but the poem seems less interested in realism than in making the boy as innocent as possible, so that his hope is hard to bear.
The promise also arrives "in his letter." Paper keeps its promises long after circumstances change, and the poem does not say when the letter was written. That silence leaves room for something chilling: the father's words may be all the boy has left.
At line nine the poem turns. The tense matters here: the boy "would say" this "to everyone he saw," and the people "would look" at the mother. The "would" suggests a routine repeated day after day, so what we see is one performance in a long run. The mother, meanwhile, never speaks. Her son gets all the quotation marks, while she is described only through colour: she is "in blue," and she has "green eyes." Blue reads naturally as sadness, though it may also be there simply for the rhyme. The eyes are the one place the poem lets us look closely, and what the onlookers read there is "the pain and regret of the lies." Judging by the wording, the lies seem to be the comforting untruths that keep the boy happy, though the poem does not spell this out. Either way, her silence is a form of protection, and it costs her something.
The repeated words trace the poem's grief. "Home" and "come" return throughout, from "comin' home" to "come today" to "never come," so a verb of arrival ends the poem as a verb of absence. The title "Waiting" is a present participle, an action that never finishes, and the last line hands it back to us attached to the boy.
The poem names no war, country, or date. The phrase "as it is for some" deliberately widens the scene, so the boy can stand for any child in a similar position. The poem also makes us part of the crowd in the park, people who understand and say nothing, and that discomfort is where its force comes from. Its form is simple enough for a nursery, and it uses that simplicity to say something difficult.