Mary62708's "Mother" opens with a paradox that the whole poem then works to unpack: "You are here yet I cannot see you." Whoever the "you" is, she is present in some sense, and still the speaker, a daughter, as the line "my daughter and I'm proud" implies, cannot reach her. The central idea is a grief that has no funeral and no clear ending: mourning someone who is, in some way, still here.
The poem is built like a slow, repeated inventory. Four stanzas open with the same sentence frame, "You are here yet I cannot…", and each swaps in a different sense: see, feel, hear, smell. Each stanza keeps the same internal order. The second line names a general loss ("the smile of a mother," "the warmth from a hug"), the third lists small daily rituals ("The wave hello and goodbye," "the kiss goodnight and being tucked in"), and the fourth reaches for something less tangible. Notice how that last line shifts from the physical to the abstract: "the resemblance," "the connection," "our heart beats sync," and finally "I cannot smell home on you." The poem moves inward, from what can be observed to what a child feels at the deepest level. The final example is the most striking, because it makes "home" a smell, something you recognise without thinking, and so something you cannot fake or replace.
The choice of ordinary, almost humble details gives the poem its force. There are no grand statements about love, only tucking in, cooking, perfume. The poet seems to understand that a mother is mostly made of repeated small acts, and that losing those acts is what hurts. Even the spoken phrases are clipped and plain: "the I love you," "the my daughter and I'm proud." The awkward grammar of the second quotation reads like a list of sentences the speaker is trying to recall, or imagine, and the poem never says which. That gap makes the absence feel sharper, since the speaker can name the words but cannot hear them.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no regular metre. Its rhythm comes from repetition, which gives it a chant-like, almost insistent beat, as if the speaker keeps testing the same locked door. There is hardly any punctuation, so the lines run on in an unbroken, breathless way. That makes the one full stop in the poem, after "I mourn you," land with real weight.
That fifth stanza is where the pattern breaks. "Cannot" gives way to "mourn," and the word repeats twice more. The earlier stanzas described what is lacking; this one names the emotion outright. It also looks forward: "the years we have missed / The ones we will not see." The loss isn't only in the past, because the speaker expects it to continue. There is a small formal surprise here too. For the first time, line endings rhyme: "see" in the third line and "me" in the last. Rhyme appears only at the very close, and it lands on the plainest claim in the poem: "For you are meant to be with me." "Meant to be" is the language of how things ought to be, and it makes the grief sound like a protest as well as a sadness.
The poem never explains why the mother is out of reach. Death, distance, estrangement and illness would all fit what is on the page, and the text itself gives no way to choose between them. That openness is part of its strength. A reader can bring their own situation to it and still find the poem true.
Its significance lies in this combination of simple means and a difficult feeling. By running through the senses one by one, the poem treats a mother as something known through the whole body, and shows how complete a loss can be when every sense comes back empty. It also names a kind of grief we rarely talk about, the sorrow of someone who is here and yet not there.