Everything should change. The opening line sounds like a manifesto, but the poem quickly turns playful. The speaker imagines "a third eye / or another pair of arms. / Or wings," then adds, almost shyly, "I've always wanted / a tail." The joke is a quiet confession, and it sets the tone: the voice is chatty and self-mocking, and it doesn't pretend to be grand. Yet the poem will end up asking for the whole world to be remade.
The wishes shrink at first and then expand. After the fantasy of new body parts comes a modest, almost comic makeover: jeans swapped for "cotton print dresses / with lace collars," another attempt at sewing, a possible gingerbread house. The questions ("Should I try again…?" "Dare I attempt…?") show a speaker unsure of herself and trying on a new identity. Then the tone firms up. "I want to be softer, / quieter" is a plain statement, and what follows is not about clothes. She wants "to remember the stories / so I can tell them right," with photos labeled, letters boxed, "the knick-knacks / accounted for." The poem suggests she is stepping into the role of family memory-keeper, though it never says exactly who she is or how she is related to the child.
That child arrives late and sideways. The "sharp edges" and "Nothing loud" of the house could be a décor choice, but the next stanza breaks the sentence across a gap: "everything / else that might hurt // a baby." Only here do we learn what has driven all these wishes. The pause after "hurt" is the poem's one real moment of fear. The word "guns" slips into the list of dangers without ceremony, as if it were another thing to be padded or put out of reach, like a sharp corner on a table.
The poem's grammar carries its argument. "Should" runs through it: "Everything should change," "The world should / get better," "All the guns / should vanish," "All the gods / should stop." It is the word of someone who wants a great deal and has no power to command it. "Should" is not "will," and the speaker knows the difference. Her only firm future tense is domestic: "There will be no / sharp edges / in our house." She can promise her own rooms, so she asks for everything else.
The gods may be the poem's best invention. They should "stop and shake hands / out in public / where their people can see." The plural "gods" avoids naming any one faith, and the image treats divine rivalry as bad behavior between neighbors, settled by a handshake. It is funny, and it is also a serious wish for a world where believers aren't set against one another. The detail "where their people can see" shows the speaker understands that example matters more than decree.
Formally, the poem is nine unrhymed quatrains in short, conversational lines, with no ornament to distract from the voice. Small links hold the stanzas together. "Or wings" at the end of one stanza is picked up by "Maybe I will sprout wings" at the start of the next. Near the end, the repeated "with the sunny, / soft-colored rooms" builds a list that opens outward, from "his house with the lilacs" and its "little garden" to "every corner of every place." The closing line, "Every single one," has the stubborn insistence of a child's "all of them," and it feels right that a poem about protecting a baby would end in that simple cadence. The shift from "our house" to "his house" is also worth noticing, since the poem leaves open whose home this is and gives the child the last word on ownership.
The poem matters because it treats a tender impulse as a large one. The wish for a safe nursery and the wish for peace among the gods turn out to be the same wish at different sizes. The speaker's early fantasies of wings and a tail are a last glance at a freer, stranger self, and the poem gives them up gently, for a softer self and a kinder world, without sounding sentimental.