Laziness is rarely praised in poems, yet Mary F. C. Pratt's twelve-line "Open Studio Poem 2" begins with it: "Too lazy today to pay attention / to the face in the looking glass." The admission is offhand, almost a shrug, and that is the poem's trick. What looks like a lapse becomes the doorway to an idea, that not scrutinising your own reflection might be healthier than doing so. By the last line, a lazy morning has turned into a small act of courage.
At its core, the poem asks how much appearance should matter. The question arrives plainly, "Does it matter what we look like?", and is never answered outright. The speaker moves on to something she is "learning lately": to be "my own friend." The tense is worth noticing. She does not claim to have mastered self-acceptance. She is in the middle of learning it, and "lately" makes the change sound recent and a little fragile. That honesty keeps the poem from sounding like a slogan.
The mirror is the main image, and it carries baggage. "Mirror, mirror on the wall" is the fairy-tale queen's chant, the voice of someone who hands the verdict on her worth to a piece of glass. Pratt quotes the line but sets it between dashes, so it sounds like a half-remembered singsong, even a gentle mockery, rather than a real question. The speaker, by contrast, barely glances at the mirror. The slightly old-fashioned phrase "looking glass" can also suggest something you look through as well as at, which fits the closing lines, where she wants to "see / what's on the other side." The poem never says what that side holds. Judging by the rest of the poem, it could be character, inner life, or simply the part of a person that a mirror can't show. Leaving it open lets readers fill it in themselves.
There is no rhyme here. The poem is free verse, built from short lines that sound like thinking aloud. The line breaks often split a phrase just where a speaker might hesitate: "The kind / of friend I need," "The kind / of nerve it takes." The sentences seem to grope for the right description, and when the words arrive they come as clipped fragments: "A friend / with pluck. Spunk." Those words are brisk, one-syllable and cheerfully old-fashioned, the vocabulary you might use for a spirited sidekick. The fragments also act out the quality they name, since they are short, bouncy and unfussy. "Nerve" lands a little harder, and it quietly admits that this takes effort. In a culture that trains us to check how we look, ignoring the face does take nerve.
Repetition holds the poem together. "Friend" appears three times, and "kind" twice, meaning "type" but also, perhaps, hinting at kindness, which is what a good friend offers. The most telling repetition is "face." It opens the poem as something the speaker is too lazy to attend to, and it returns near the end as something she chooses to "ignore." The act is the same, but it has changed from an accident into a decision. That shift is the poem's whole argument in miniature. There is one more small shift: the question about appearance uses "we," the only plural in the poem, before the speaker returns to "I." She asks a general question, then answers it for herself alone.
The title, "Open Studio Poem 2," suggests one of a numbered series and hints at a connection with art-making, though the poem itself never says so. If we read it that way, there is a nice tension in a poem from a place of looking, a studio, that is about choosing not to look at one thing in order to see another.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. Appearance and self-worth are among the most familiar worries a young reader can have, and many poems treat them solemnly. Pratt's answer is practical, light and a little funny. She doesn't tell us to love our reflection. She suggests we stop making it the judge, and put a more encouraging companion in its place.