A child looks back at the grandmother who raised her, and the poem is full of things the speaker reports without quite understanding. Mother "fell down the stairs," but only because Gram said so. Daddy is "sleeping it off" while the children wait outside a hotel. The speaker never questions any of it, and that flat, matter-of-fact tone is what makes the poem hit so hard. The dark facts sit quietly between the cheerful ones.
Gram is clearly loved. She turns cartons into dressing tables and makes a game of staying quiet. Her "squinty eyes from looking at the fairies" are described with real admiration, like the eyes of owls. But the ending suggests that her visions may be something more troubling. In jail, she says the Queen tried to rescue her but couldn't get past the iron bars. The mood is tender and sad at once: a girl still holding on to Gram's stories, even when the adult world around her is falling apart.