Lydie Toure's "Everybody" is a short, quiet look at how ordinary and how fragile a human life is. The speaker begins with something that sounds almost comforting: everybody gets a turn at living. But the lines that follow take things away. Memory fades, and with it the love, the grief, the fear and the life itself. Nothing, it seems, is left behind.
The speaker doesn't sound panicked or angry. The tone is flat, matter-of-fact, almost like someone stating a simple rule. That calm is what makes the poem unsettling. The final lines are the most striking: "sometimes, / They die." The word "sometimes" is oddly casual, as if death were an occasional accident rather than the end waiting for everyone. That gap between the gentle phrasing and the heavy fact leaves a mood of quiet sadness, tinged with a kind of resigned acceptance. The poem seems to ask us to notice how brief and shared our time is.