The goddess in the first half of this poem is spotless, and that is the problem. Mary F. C. Pratt starts by surveying the many forms of the Earth Mother: carved in caves, displayed in museums, sold in shops among "crystals and beads." Then she undercuts the whole gallery with one flat sentence, "She doesn't look like Meg or me." The second half answers it by showing who Meg and the speaker are and what they are doing.
The opening stanza is built from a list, and the list is the point. Almost every line begins with "she" or a phrase that slides toward her, and the verbs sit in a timeless present: she "wears," she "holds." The little word "or" keeps offering variations, a pregnant figure, a nursing one, a giant on a throne, a girl with a crescent moon, as if the same image could be reshuffled forever. Her body is treated like a display: fruit is "stacked on her huge thighs," as on a shelf. Even old age is tidied up. Her gray hair "flows like water," and she is "slim as a broom." That simile is a small joke, because a broom is a working tool, and here it is reduced to a figure measurement. The hands holding the cornstalk are "smooth and elegant," hands that have clearly never pulled anything out of the ground. Then comes the shortest line in the poem, "She's always clean," which sounds almost deadpan. The shift from "caves and museums" to "shops" also suggests how an ancient symbol of fertility becomes a decorative product.
The second stanza switches to "we," to past tense, and to named people. Rob, the tractor and the clay are specific in a way the goddess never is. The clothes are listed as carefully as the goddess's gowns, but they are "old sneakers," "baggy jeans that had seen better days," and "baseball caps over our graying hair." The "graying" quietly echoes the goddess's tidy "gray hair," and the sons' "outgrown t-shirts" slip in the women's real motherhood without comment. They are mothers in fact, not in costume.
The verbs here are blunt and physical: "kicked," "stamped," "hoed," "stamped again." The repetition makes you feel the tedium of the job, and the rhythm becomes almost a chant. By the end the stamping has turned into something else: the women "circled" the saplings, "stamping, / in the light spring rain." Without saying so, the poem has described a ritual, a kind of dance around the thing being brought to life. The vocabulary of birth has crept in as well. The tree slips have "orange roots wet and coiled" and buds "ready to break open green." The braced "purple sticks" are called "unlikely babies," which answers the opening image of the baby "hanging from her breast." The nurturing is the same. Only the glamour has been removed. Even the water has changed from a simile, hair that "flows like water," to actual rain falling on the workers.
The form supports this contrast. Neither stanza rhymes, and the language stays conversational throughout. The first stanza runs to fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but without a sonnet's music, so its neatness feels like the neatness of a display case. The second stanza is longer, and its sentences run on as the work does, with fewer pauses and more motion. The poem ends mid-scene, on the rain, with no moral attached.
That restraint is part of what makes the poem significant. It never announces that Meg and the speaker are the true Earth Mothers, but the plural title lets them claim the phrase. The poem doesn't mock the old idea of a nature goddess so much as ask who gets to embody it. Its answer is middle-aged women with dirt on their gloves, whose connection to the earth comes from labor, patience and a willingness to get wet. The image the poem prefers is not young, clean or still. It is the one in motion.