Getting through a day is rarely counted as an achievement, but in Mary62708's "Today" it is the only goal the speaker has left. The first line sets the terms: "I try to get through today." Nobody here is planning or hoping. "Try" and "get through" are the verbs we use for storms, exams and long journeys, things to be endured rather than enjoyed. The second line closes the door on the future: "I don't care for tomorrow." The central idea is a life shrunk down to one day at a time, followed by the discovery that the shrinking doesn't work, because the days keep arriving anyway.
We have no reliable information about who wrote this or when, so the text has to speak for itself. It speaks in a deliberately bare voice. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and almost no punctuation apart from a single comma. The words are nearly all short and ordinary. The stanzas are mostly two lines long, each pair working like a thought followed by its quiet afterthought. Without a beat to carry us along, the poem moves at the speed of someone reluctantly talking, and the missing full stops make it feel as if it could trail off at any moment.
Time is the poem's main subject, and it is treated as something physical. Tomorrow "can run away from me / Along with the light", so time seems to have legs, and the light suggests both a darkening evening and a loss of comfort or hope. The pronoun "It" is slightly ambiguous, and it is not clear whether the thing running away is tomorrow or the day itself. That vagueness suits a speaker for whom time has lost its edges. The next stanza then contradicts the first: "It's heavy, you know / Today is heavy." Something heavy shouldn't be able to run away, yet the speaker feels both at once. The present drags like a weight, while the hours still vanish without anything having been done. That mix is a convincing picture of exhaustion. The small aside "you know" turns the poem toward a listener and hints at a wish to be understood.
The middle stanzas flatten everything out. "Today becomes yesterday / Along with every other day" repeats the phrase "along with" from earlier, so the light and the days are swept off together. The phrase "every other day" strips the days of their individuality, as if they were identical. Then comes the shrug of "Then that's life", the shortest and plainest summing-up the poem could offer. What follows is its only violent image: life "swallows me whole." Life becomes a creature, and the speaker does not struggle. Notice how often "me" is the object of the sentence: time runs away "from me" and life swallows "me". The speaker never does anything to the day except try to get through it.
The last stanza is the only one with three lines, and it is where the poem turns back on itself. "At the end of today / The next today comes." The phrase "next today" is the cleverest moment in the poem, because it shows that tomorrow isn't a separate thing at all. It is simply today again. That undoes the earlier refusal, since you can't decline a tomorrow that always turns into today. The repeated line "And I don't care for tomorrow" now sounds less like a decision and more like a loop. The added "And" makes the thought continue and offers no way out. The word "today" appears five times in the body of the poem, and the repetition makes the word itself feel heavy.
The poem doesn't explain any of this. It gives no cause, no consolation and no moral, and it never says what the speaker has lost or what is wrong. Judging by the language, it suggests a tired, low state of mind, but it leaves the reader to fill in the reasons. Its significance lies in that restraint. Most of us have known a smaller version of this feeling, a day we simply had to get through, and the poem finds words for it without decoration. It also shows students that a poem doesn't need elaborate metaphor to carry weight. A few plain words, repeated until they weigh something, can be enough.