The speaker visits a small hillside cemetery and reads the stones that can still be read: a two-year-old boy, Franklin, and his mother, Atlanta, who died at thirty-three. From these bare facts, the speaker imagines the world Atlanta lived in. The mountain was open pasture and scrub, not forest, and life was hard, with disease and winter hunger always close by.
The speaker then links past and present. Atlanta, in October, would have watched the same silver sunrise over the valley that the speaker sees now. Yet the poem ends by noting what she would not have seen: the colorful maples, oaks, and pines that now cover the land, and the old sheep fence swallowed by tree growth. The mood is quiet and respectful, tinged with tenderness. The speaker feels close to Atlanta through shared light, but also aware of how much has changed, and how much time separates them.