Twenty-four years is a long time to carry a question, and Mary F. C. Pratt's poem to her sister Sue shows what that question has turned into. The dates under the title, November 29, 1955 to June 27, 1993, mark Sue's life. The poem itself is dated June 27, 2017, which is the anniversary of her death, and the poem's own "twenty-four years" fits that arithmetic. So the poem reads as an anniversary taking-stock: what did the loss change, and what is left?
It gives three answers in turn. First comes a vow: "After you died, I determined to live / more worthy." The phrasing is slightly awkward, "more worthy" rather than "more worthily," as if the speaker is describing a state of being rather than a way of acting. She left work she "was not / sure about" and "took up my pen." The poem is itself the result of that decision. Second comes a quarrel with God, and third a quiet domestic scene with a statue and a photograph.
The most interesting writing is in the middle stanzas. The speaker has "spiraled back toward something / maybe like god." A spiral is not a straight road home. It circles, returns to a familiar place at a different height, and never quite lands. The hedging adds to that: "something," "maybe," "like." Her faith has not been destroyed, but it is no longer sure of itself. Then the grammar of her anger shifts. God is first "the one I thought I knew," then "that one," and finally just "it": "How could it / allow so damned much pain." The pronoun shrinks as her trust falls away. The two "how could" questions also end in full stops, not question marks, so they sound less like requests for an answer than like accusations. Plain, almost blunt words such as "damned" and "die" avoid any softening.
The form supports this. The poem is in six unrhymed tercets, with no regular meter, so it sounds like speech. Sentences spill over the stanza breaks again and again: "but not / the one I thought I knew," "despite / our prayers." These breaks leave key words dangling at the ends of lines, and "despite" is the sharpest. The reader has to wait a beat to learn what the prayers failed to do. The rhythm keeps stumbling forward without resolving, much like grief.
The last two stanzas turn from argument to objects, and the tense changes from the past of the opening to the present: the monk "stands," the photo "hangs." The pottery monk, a gift from Sue, has "folded hands" and a "beautific smile." His hands are in the posture of prayer, which quietly echoes "our prayers" from earlier, yet his calm contrasts with the speaker's agitation. Beside him is a "jade tree / in a green pot," a living, growing thing. Nothing in the poem says whether the speaker finds him comforting or maddening. He simply stays serene.
Then comes the photograph: Sue's face "pensive, dark eyes gazing / toward something I cannot see." The final phrase answers the earlier "something / maybe like god." Both "somethings" are real to someone but out of reach. The speaker's uncertain faith and her sister's far-off gaze turn out to be the same condition, looking toward what can't be seen. The poem ends there, without telling us what Sue sees or whether the speaker will ever see it too.
What makes the poem significant is this refusal to console. It doesn't turn grief into a lesson or force a return to belief, and it doesn't swing to bitter atheism either. It holds anger, love, doubt and a lingering openness side by side, which is how loss often feels. The gift of a small statue, kept in view for years, shows how a relationship continues through objects. By the end, the vow made in the first stanza has been kept in the act of writing the poem itself.