The speaker picks up three ordinary turnips and looks at them as if seeing vegetables for the first time. The poem moves through a string of surprising comparisons: the turnips are like old wineskins holding sharp new wine, like faded carousels in a rundown amusement park, like alien objects that seem to come from another planet. Their rat-like tails and cut-off tops make them awkward to hold, a little comic and a little sad.
The mood shifts in the third stanza. Cut off from the soil, the turnips have no way to sprout or find their way back to light, so they seem stranded. The speaker sounds amused, curious, and quietly sympathetic.
The ending is the quietest part. Sliced open, the turnips reveal pale, empty-looking deserts with no wind to disturb them. The playful tone gives way to something stiller and more lonely, as if the plain vegetable holds a whole silent world inside it.