The speaker begins with a plain, almost childlike plea: give me an ointment, a plaster, something to treat the pain. But the wound doesn't sound like a cut or a bruise. Calling out "My mother" in the middle of the poem feels like the instinctive cry of someone hurting so much that they reach for the first source of comfort they ever knew. It could be a call to an actual mother, or simply the word a person says when help is needed and nothing else will do.
Then the poem widens. The "common axe" suggests something ordinary and shared by everyone, and it "pierces, singing," which is a strange, unsettling pairing of violence and music. The closing line, "between wedding and grave," places that axe across the whole span of a life, from its celebrations to its end. The mood is quiet, sorrowful and stark. The pain seems to be not just personal but universal, and no plaster can fully fix it.