Some conversations between a parent and a grown child never mention the thing they are really about. In "Calling Crows," Mary F. C. Pratt gives us an afternoon in a mother's house. The speaker sorts papers, makes tea and tidies, while the mother sits at the window and watches crows. Nothing happens, and that is the point. Underneath the chores sits a harder subject: the speaker cannot accept the mother's love, and the mother cannot quite be told the truth about her child's life.
The poem is built from small, practical actions. The speaker hunts for "notices and bills," carries books, makes tea. The mother, for her part, bends for a paperclip. Pratt sets their scoldings side by side in matching sentences: "She scolds me for carrying / a stack of books she thinks too heavy. / I scold her because she bends / to pick a paperclip from the floor." Each is trying to protect the other, but it comes out as nagging. Care here is clumsy and slightly comic, and the symmetry hints at a role reversal, with the child now looking after the parent.
Then come the silences. The mother "won't write captions" for the family photographs, including the trip to Mexico "after the War," and the speaker doesn't bring copies of poems or mention the book. Each woman guards something. The poem itself is the very thing the speaker withholds, a piece of writing about a mother who will never read it.
The image at the centre is "Our failures persist like rusty stains / on Grandma's tablecloth." A tablecloth belongs to family meals, and rust is slow, stubborn damage that scrubbing doesn't remove. Because the cloth is Grandma's, the stains seem inherited, passed down through three generations. The word "our" matters too, since the failures are shared and not one person's fault.
The poem is in free verse. It has no rhyme and no regular beat, and the short, plain lines sound like speech. Pratt leaves out quotation marks, so the mother's words slide into the narration. A few sound effects stand out in this quiet style. "Her tiny dog snores his tiny snore" is funny and tender, and the repetition makes the dog's snore sound like a small, contented machine, the only relaxed presence in the room.
The line breaks do the emotional work in the fourth stanza. "Mother can say You're doing / so well. You make me so happy / but that's not something I know how / to hear." The sentence breaks in the middle of the compliment and again before "to hear," as if the words stumble on their way in. The double space after "well." works like a held breath. Then comes a neat echo: the speaker answers, "You did what you had to do," but the mother "knows / so well that I am wrong." The phrase "so well" first describes the speaker's success and then the mother's understanding of the speaker's error. The same words can comfort or wound, depending on who hears them. The repeated "can" does something similar: "I can call them," "Mother can say," "I can say." The poem keeps asking what each person is able to say, and what the other is able to take in.
The crows frame all of this. They begin as the mother's small boast: "I caw and they come." In the last lines she is calling again: "Caw, she says, caw. / Now come and see." The crows answer her at once, which is more than the speaker has managed. The ending can be read two ways. It is literally an invitation to join her at the window. It is also an invitation to see her, and perhaps to let her love arrive without argument. Crows are often thought of as ominous, but here they are companionable, and the poem hints that her voice can reach her child as easily as it reaches the birds.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It doesn't stage a reconciliation or a confession. It leaves the speaker still unable to hear praise, and it ends on the mother's offer. That open ending, with a call still hanging in the air, makes the poem feel honest and moving.