The poem is just three lines, and it reads like a news item: an infant's skeleton is found in a suitcase after an elderly woman dies. The title places it on New Year's Eve, a night for endings and fresh starts, and that contrast gives the lines much of their sting. While people look ahead, this story drags something buried into the open.
Notice how little is said. There is no speaker commenting, no outrage, no sympathy. The flat, reportorial tone holds back all feeling, so readers have to supply their own. We are left wondering whose child this was, why the suitcase was kept, and what the woman carried through her long life. The poem gives no answers, and the poem itself doesn't claim any.
The mood is eerie, sad, and quietly shocking. A suitcase suggests travel and leaving, yet this one held something that never moved on. The silence around it is what lingers.