The speaker moves through an ordinary morning, but everything seems slightly off. Friends are recognized not by their faces but by the worry showing behind their masks, which suggests a time of shared anxiety, though the poem never says exactly what has caused it. In town, an enormous crane towers over the buildings like part of a strange film set, making familiar streets feel unreal.
Then the setting shifts to a meadow full of weeds and bare, "hopeless" elm sticks. A raven flies so close that her wing's shadow brushes the speaker, a small, startling touch that feels both intimate and ominous.
The poem ends with questions rather than answers. The speaker wonders what it means to live in such complicated days, and whether every era has felt this way while people were too busy with trivial things to notice. The mood is quiet, uneasy, and thoughtful, with a sense of doubt about how much of the strangeness is new and how much has always been there.