Everyone in Mary F. C. Pratt's "What We Carry" is hauling the same kind of burden, yet nobody can see inside anyone else's bag. In just eight lines, the poem sketches tired, separated, stubbornly functioning people and asks us to see their ordinary persistence as something close to heroic. Its central idea is that endurance is shared even when the load itself cannot be shared out. Each person bears "our bit of the impossible load" alone, but the small wave across the distance says *I'm still here, and so are you.*
The opening image is plain and heavy: "Each of us carries a bag, a tough bag." The repetition of "bag" has a plodding insistence, like someone hitching a strap higher on a shoulder. "Tough" works in two directions. It describes the bag, built to last, and it quietly describes the people who carry it. What the bag holds is "the weight of our times and years." "Times" can mean the historical moment or the hard occasions of a life, and "years" is purely personal, so the load is both public and private. The poem never says what is actually inside, and that vagueness lets any reader fill the bag with their own contents.
The second couplet turns bleak, then strange. "Each of us is half-dead these days" is blunt and colloquial, the kind of thing said over a fence. The exaggeration feels earned because the tone is so flat. Then comes "firewall," the most surprising word in the poem. A firewall protects by separating, whether it is the barrier in a building or the software kind. Judging by the word alone, a reader might think of screens or of any wall between people, but the poem doesn't say which. What matters is the effect: contact is possible but filtered. The line break after "We wave" leaves the gesture hanging for a moment before the next line carries it "to one another across the firewall."
The third couplet is where the poem turns. "We wave, and blink our eyes" repeats the verb, and the blink is the smallest sign of life imaginable. It could be someone surfacing from sleep, or someone squinting to see who is on the other side. Then "For each is still / alive." The line break isolates "alive" at the start of a new line, so it lands hard after "half-dead," and "For" turns the waving into evidence: we wave because we are alive, and the waving proves it. The image that follows, "one sleeve rolled up, scrubbing along," is humble and physical. It suggests a person at work, not a hero. "Scrubbing" brings in cleaning and labour, and the phrase also echoes the everyday idiom of scraping along, so the line manages to be both dignified and rough.
The form matches this tone. The poem has four unrhymed couplets, with no regular meter and long, conversational lines. Sentences spill over the ends of lines and across stanzas ("For each is still / alive," "scrubbing along / however we can"), so the poem keeps moving without ever quite resting, like someone walking with a load. The pronouns are all plural, "us," "we," "our," and there is no "I" anywhere. Three times the poem begins a thought with "each," which keeps reminding us that this is a crowd of individuals, not a single blur. The verbs also climb in seriousness: "carries," then the strained, physical "lugging," then "bearing," which carries something of ceremony and dignity.
The ending refuses any relief. The last word is "load," and nothing has been put down. That honesty is the poem's real strength. It does not tell us the weight will lift, and it does not wallow in the weight either. It holds "half-dead" and "still alive" in the same breath and lets the second claim win by a narrow margin, through a wave, a blink and a rolled sleeve.
In eight short lines the poem makes the case that survival is not nothing, and that recognizing one another's survival, even through a barrier, is a form of company. It asks little of its reader beyond attention, and it leaves the bag closed so that everyone can imagine their own.