The plainest line in "Reunion" is also the one everything else depends on: "I waited a long time." The speaker, a young woman working in a hotel kitchen by a river, never describes how that waiting felt. Her feelings come through what she does and what other people notice. The poem is about faith kept up through a long, silent stretch, and about how the people around us can hold that faith when we can't.
The situation is told in a few efficient strokes. She "came first" and found a job in a hotel where people stay "before they go on the riverboats." That detail is quietly important. The hotel is a place of departures, with travellers passing through on their way elsewhere, while she stays put and watches for one arrival. Her remark that "things can get rough sometimes," followed by "I'm glad I'm in the kitchen," hints at the risks of being a woman on her own in such a place. The kitchen is her shelter. The man's delay is explained in equally down-to-earth terms. He promised to come "right after he helped the parents / with the butchering and the beans." Those chores make him real, a son with obligations, and make his lateness believable rather than villainous. Her one note of complaint is a small word: she hadn't "even had a letter."
The poem is free verse with no rhyme or fixed meter, and it sounds like someone talking. The lines are short and the sentences are mostly simple. Enjambment follows the rhythm of speech: "He said he'd come / right after he helped the parents." The title places the poem in an *American Folk Song Suite*, and the plain, storytelling voice fits that label. I can't say more than that about the suite, but the poem does read like a tale told aloud, with a refrain-like comfort from Cook returning in different forms: "he'll come," then "he'll get here."
Cook is the poem's warmest presence. She speaks in homely, confident phrases ("I can feel it in my bones," "mighty thin") and calls the speaker "child," which suggests a motherly role, though the poem never says so. The speaker has been crying into the batter while "stirring up the buckwheat cakes," and the line shows grief and routine sharing the same moment. Her admission that she hasn't eaten for "a day or so" because she's "been that worried" is another way the poem shows emotion without naming it. Worry here is physical: she is getting thin. Cook's answer is just as physical. She makes the girl sit and eat "a plate of cakes, all buttered up." The phrase is cosy and slightly comic, and it suggests that the first step in comfort is feeding someone. Cook's words also carry a compliment: "Only a fool wouldn't come / for a woman like you." Faith in the man is joined to faith in the speaker's worth.
The ending is the poem's best piece of craft. The title has already given away that the two will meet, so suspense isn't the point. What matters is the way it happens. One long sentence unwinds slowly ("While I was eating them, / I looked out the kitchen window") and then lands on a short, almost breathless clause: "and there he was." The rhythm mimics a glance upward and a sudden recognition. The final image, "coming down the hill in the rain," reverses the poem's earlier stillness. She has been fixed in place, and now someone is finally moving toward her. The rain might suggest hardship, but here it reads as proof of the long walk Cook mentioned. He arrives weathered, having come all that way.
The poem stops at the sight of him. There is no embrace, no speech, no outburst of joy. That restraint is its quiet strength. By ending on what she sees through a window while her mouth is full of buttered buckwheat cake, Pratt lets relief come through the ordinary details of the scene. It is a small, humane poem that suggests love is often a matter of patience, and that being fed and believed in by someone else can get us through the waiting.