Not knowing is where the poem begins, and it says so three times in its first stanza: "Don't know what to do / Don't know what to say" and, finally, "Don't know who you are." The repetition works like pacing in a waiting room. The speaker has no plan, no words, and not even a face or name for the person being waited for. The grammar adds to the effect. "I'm sitting here waiting you" drops the usual "for," so the verb leans straight onto its object. It's a small oddity, but it makes the waiting feel raw and direct, with nothing to slow the speaker's attention on its way to "you."
Who is "you"? The title, "The day," and the last stanza's "when the day comes" tempt us to hear the two as one, with the awaited moment turned into a presence. Then "our work" pulls the other way, toward a partner, a collaborator, perhaps someone not yet born. The poem never chooses, and that openness is part of its power. There is also a paradox here. The speaker claims not to know who "you" is, yet already speaks of shared labour. The relationship is taken on trust before it exists.
The second stanza steps back from the waiting to the weight behind it. "I've been through a lot" is deliberately vague, and the poem never says what "that" is in "Hoping that would end." The poem gives us no details, only the fact of endurance, so the reader has to supply the hardship. What the stanza does show is a ladder of verbs: hoping, wishing, dreaming. Each is a little less practical than the last, and the scale of the objects widens with them, from the private "that would end" to "a better world" and finally "the endless sky." After the cramped "sitting here" of the first stanza, the sky is the biggest possible contrast. It gives the speaker's longing somewhere to go.
Those verbs are part of a pattern. Nearly every action in the poem is a present participle: sitting, waiting, hoping, wishing, dreaming, smiling, welcoming. These forms describe actions without an end point, which suits a speaker caught between past hardship and a future that hasn't started yet.
The poem has no regular rhyme scheme and no end punctuation. Lines are short, mostly five to seven syllables, and the vocabulary is almost entirely one-syllable words. With no full stops, the sentences are never closed off, which mimics the open-endedness of waiting. There is one faint echo: "do" at the end of the first line and "you" at the end of the third. The speaker's helplessness ("what to do") is linked by sound to the person who might end it. That may not be intended, but the link is there to hear.
The last stanza turns on the word "So." The "Don't know" refrain is replaced by the poem's only future tense: "I will be right there." The speaker still doesn't know who is coming, but has decided how to meet them: "Smiling and welcoming." The sentence runs over the line break and delivers its object on a line of its own, "All the flowers of our work," like an offering held out at the door. The flower image changes how we read everything before it. Work that blooms suggests a garden, something tended slowly and not rushed. The long waiting becomes a kind of tending, and the hardship of stanza two begins to look like what the flowers grew from. That reading is an inference, since the poem never says it, but the metaphor invites it.
The poem's significance lies in this quiet movement from uncertainty to commitment without ever resolving the uncertainty. Its hope isn't based on knowledge. "I will be right there" is a decision, made while "you" is still unknown. Because the language is so plain and "you" so unspecified, readers can fit their own situation into it: a person, a future, a change they have worked toward. A good question for discussion is who you think is arriving, and whether the poem's meaning changes depending on your answer.