Work, in Mary F. C. Pratt's "Doing Our Jobs," is not paid, tiring or even visible. A baby bangs on kettles and bowls. A grandmother stirs beans and herbs and tries to recall a tune. The poem quietly insists that both are labouring, and that the labour of the very young and the very old is the same kind of effort: learning, or holding on to, the way a person fits into the world. The word "our" in the title widens the circle further, and the reader is invited to count their own daily tasks among these.
The poem's structure makes the comparison plain. It has two stanzas of seven lines each, and they follow almost exactly the same pattern. Each opens with a flat statement about work ("The baby is working hard at his tasks," "His grandmother is working, too"). Each then moves through two more statements, two questions, a short statement, and a final question. The effect is of two mirrored panels. There is no rhyme and no regular beat, only plain, speech-like sentences that stay close to ordinary talk. That plainness suits the subject, because nothing here is grand. Yet the repeated shape lets the reader see each detail answering another: the baby's "legs" and the grandmother's "feet," his "yells" and her "cries," his "sounds" and her "harmonies."
The questions drive the poem. The statements are certain, but nearly everything else is a gamble: "Will his legs hold him up today?" "Where will her feet take her?" The baby's questions are hopeful and a little comic, since even a tray of food might be "strange." They end on a threshold: "Is this the day his sounds will be words?" The grandmother's questions are darker. "When she cries, who will hear her?" sets her beside the baby, who has an answer to the same situation in the line before: "Each time he yells, his people respond." The phrase "his people" is warm and a little old-fashioned, and it suggests a whole circle of care around him. For her, the circle is left uncertain. The poem never says she is abandoned, only that the question has to be asked.
The imagery is small and domestic, and it works through sound. The baby discovers that "each hollow reflects a special sound," so the world is a set of echoing containers to be tested. The grandmother's kettle is "full of white beans and herbs," which is a picture of nourishment and slow cooking. The shared kettle ties the two stanzas together, but the baby finds noise in it and she makes a meal. Her memory of "harmonies" hints, judging by the wording, that something once known is slipping and must be actively recovered. "Trying to remember" is the poem's most delicate phrase, and the verb "trying" gives her the same effortful dignity as the baby.
Two words carry the poem's central echo. "Hollow" belongs to the baby's world of kettles, while "silence" belongs to the grandmother's heart. A hollow gives back a sound, whereas a silence has to be "held." The baby is moving toward words, and the grandmother may be moving away from them. Her line "Laughter is her practice now" is the loveliest turn in the poem. Practice is what a child does, and here an old woman does it too. Laughter is also a sound before language, so she and the baby meet in the same place, pre-verbal and expressive, from opposite directions.
The final line makes the poem more than a cute pairing: "What silence must she hold in her heart?" The word "must" suggests obligation or burden, and the poem refuses to say what the silence contains. It might be grief or memory, or simply what cannot be spoken. Ending on a question, as the first stanza also does, leaves both lives open.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to treat old age as mere decline or infancy as mere sweetness. Both are tasks that deserve effort and attention, and the poem gives them equal weight. It suggests that being heard is a basic human need, and that who listens, and how reliably, may be the real measure of a community.