A mother is not usually a canyon, a train and a crumbling house all at once, but in "Everywhere" Mary F. C. Pratt's speaker finds her in all of them. The poem is a list of metaphors, each beginning "My mother was" or simply "She was." Its central idea is that a mother who is gone, or at least no longer within reach (the past tense suggests this, though the poem never says it outright), does not vanish. She spreads into the world, and the speaker meets her wherever she travels.
The first image is enormous. The mother is a canyon "the green river carved / through centuries of stone." It is a curious way to begin, because the mother is both the rock and the thing shaped by water over time. The line gives her patience, depth and age, and suggests a life worn into a particular form. The train "winding / between red-mud hills" adds movement, and the detail that "wild cucumber" springs "from her tracks" is quietly hopeful. Even along a path of iron and mud, something wild and green grows in her wake.
Then the poem shrinks and turns lonely. The mother is an airport sidewalk with "a solitary pigeon" pecking at crumbs. The hard *p* sounds in "pigeon pecked" almost imitate the pecking, and the scene is deliberately unglamorous. The poem says grief, or memory, attaches itself to dull places as readily as to grand ones.
The fourth and fifth stanzas are the emotional centre. The verb changes from "was" to "became," as though the speaker is watching the transformation happen. The mother is now a rain-slick cobblestone street and "an impassive golden angel" on the Paris Opera, watching "me from her perch." The angel is beautiful but does not respond. The speaker below is "dragging / my suitcase with its one broken // wheel." The poem never mentions loneliness or exhaustion, yet the image carries both. The stanza break lands just before "wheel," so the reader stumbles over the gap, as the suitcase must. Watching from above without helping, the mother feels near and unreachable at once.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and its sentences run across line and stanza breaks. This looseness suits a speaker who is moving through cities, and it makes the repeated "was" feel like a pattern the speaker keeps noticing rather than a formula. The tercets stay small and tidy even when the sentences spill over, which gives the poem a controlled, quiet tone.
The final stanza grows more specific. Until now the places could be anywhere, but here we get "my grandmother's derelict / house in Ostrowy" and a Polish word, "Kawka," the call of the jackdaws. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's family history leads back to Poland. The line "where the jackdaws never change" is the poem's quiet counterweight to loss. The house is derelict and people are gone, but the birds stay the same. The word "Kawka" works as both a call and a name, since the birds seem to say their own name. The poem ends on "name," and it connects the mother to her own mother and to an older line of descent, language and belonging.
The birds also link the poem's three scenes. The lonely pigeon, the winged angel and the calling jackdaws form a thread that runs from isolation through distance to continuity. By the end, "Everywhere" has moved from vast geology to a single word spoken by birds.
That movement makes the poem worth reading. It treats grief as something you carry through ordinary travel, in a train window, at an airport or on a wet street, and not only as an event. The title promises that the mother is everywhere, which could sound either comforting or haunting. The poem leaves both readings open: she is present in every place, and the speaker still pulls a broken suitcase through them alone.