Pratt's poem imagines all living things, and even grains of sand and slow-moving plates of rock, as part of one shared material world. People, insects, plants, fungi and anemones all appear, each with different numbers of legs, eyes or ways of "speaking." The poem keeps coming back to the same phrases: hands moving, things rising and falling, plates that "subduct and bump." The pantoum form, where lines return again and again, makes this feel like a tide or a heartbeat.
The speaker seems calm and quietly amazed rather than sad. Falling is treated as ordinary, something matter simply does, just as making is. Even the question about what anemones use for voices ("silences? wavings of branches?") sounds curious, not worried. The mood is wide, humble and a little playful. By the end, the poem suggests that we are not separate from the twigs, the deserts or the clocks on the beaches. We are all the same matter, making and falling together.