The flood in this poem has already come and gone, and the poem never describes it. We get only what it left behind: bowed flowers, closed roads, a rerouted river. That choice shapes everything. Pratt's speaker keeps circling something she doesn't name, and loss reaches us through the landscape, a myth and a bodily detail instead of a direct statement.
The poem opens with a question, "What have the sunflowers lost?", and the question is odd, because flowers don't lose things the way people do. Yet the next lines give them human faces. Their heads are "bent down heavy," and they search the ground "anxiously, earnestly," two adverbs that make the flowers sound like worried people looking for a dropped ring. Then the poem goes further and imagines they might be listening to Persephone, "raped and tattered and scared," crying underground for her mother. The myth fits the scene well. The sunflowers' roots are in the soaked earth, and Persephone is the girl taken beneath it. The three adjectives, strung together with "and," pile up like blows, and the violence of the word "raped" is left unsoftened. The stanza then ends flatly: "There's nothing they can do." It is the plainest line so far, and it may be the key to the poem. The sunflowers, and perhaps the speaker, can hear a cry and cannot answer it.
After that comes a pause: "Swallows are lined up on the wire now: / black beads on a string." It is only two lines, and the second has no verb, as if the speaker is simply looking. The image is exact and a little eerie, since the birds look like something small and strung together, and the stanza has no closing full stop, so it hangs in the air. Judging by the sunflowers and the swallows gathered on the wire, the season seems to be turning toward autumn, a time of leaving.
The poem then turns inward. "Once more I'm getting fat / like I was after the baby was born / but now I don't have that excuse." The tone is wry and self-mocking, almost throwaway, yet the repeated word "excuse" gives it weight. Pregnancy and birth once explained the speaker's changed body, and now nothing does. The final line of the stanza, "I'll never have that excuse again," is firm and a little bleak. The poem doesn't say why, so we are left to infer. It could be age, or a closed chapter of life, or something sadder. What matters is the link to Persephone's mother, because this stanza places a mother's own body and history beside the myth's crying daughter. The poem doesn't spell out the connection, but the nearness of the two stanzas suggests one.
The last two stanzas return to the outer world and read like notes in a diary. "We drove along roads that had been closed, / gravel thick along the shoulders. / New channels carved in the river." These lines are plain and observational, and the unfussy detail makes them convincing. The river will not go back to its old course, which echoes the body that won't go back to its old shape. Whether or not the poet meant the parallel, it sits quietly in the poem.
Then comes the ending, one of the most memorable things about the poem. At home, a catbird "perched / on top of a wild apple tree / pretended to be somebody else." Catbirds are known for imitating other birds' songs, so the image is true to nature as well as funny. But it lands as something more than a joke. After a poem full of exposed feeling, the last picture is of a creature performing another identity, perhaps the way people sound fine when they aren't. The poem stops there with no moral and no comfort.
The poem is a short free-verse piece with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its stanzas vary in length, from seven lines down to two, and its rhythm is closer to speech than song. That looseness suits its subject. Grief here is not organized or resolved, and the poem lets mythic, domestic and natural details sit side by side without explaining how they connect. The reader has to do that work, and that is where the poem's quiet power comes from. It shows how a private loss and a public disaster can blur together, so that a flooded field, an old story and a changed body all seem to say the same thing.