Nobody runs in this poem, and that is the whole point. A wave is coming, other people are crying, and the figure at the centre does the least dramatic thing available: sits down. Everything that follows grows out of that refusal to flee.
The poem never says what the waves are. They arrive "abruptly," they "overtake," and eventually they are "knocking at the door," but they could stand for grief, panic, change, or simply the bad days everyone meets sooner or later. That vagueness is useful, because it lets the image fit any trouble that can't be dodged. The central idea seems to be that when something is unavoidable, the fear of it is the heavier burden. The line "The lesser of 2 evils" carries this weight. The poem doesn't name the two evils, but judging by the closing "No fear no more," the choice looks like being overtaken by the wave versus being overtaken by terror, and the speaker decides the wave is the better deal.
The construction is deliberately bare. The word "sit" appears five times in fifteen lines, and it changes job as it goes. It starts as an instruction ("Sit outside") and becomes a description ("You sit"), so advice turns into a portrait of someone who has already managed it. "You sit and you sit" is the best moment of this. The doubling stretches time on the page, and because the lines are only a few syllables long and there is almost no punctuation, the reader is made to wait as well. There is no regular meter. The rhythm is closer to quiet speech or a low chant, flat and repetitive, which suits a speaker determined not to get worked up.
The rhyme is sparing. Most lines go unrhymed, then each stanza clicks shut. In the first, "fear," "there" and "dear" form a run, with "fear" and "dear" a full rhyme and "there" close behind. The second ends on the couplet "more" and "door." Because the rest is so loose, these moments of rhyme feel like exhalations, the sound of calm arriving. "Calm, my dear" is also the one place where a second voice seems to enter, tender, like someone talking down a frightened child. It might also be the speaker comforting themselves. The poem doesn't say, and both readings work.
Fear itself is passed from one stanza to the next. In the first it belongs to "others," who are "crying tears of fear." In the second it is dismissed outright: "No fear no more." The poem says very little about how this change happens. The smile on the face seems to be the evidence that it has.
The imagery shifts too. The waves begin as something sudden and natural, then become a visitor. "They overtake you" is plural, but a few lines later "The wave overtakes" is singular, as if the crowd of threats has narrowed to one that can be faced. Then comes the knocking, a polite, domestic sound far gentler than crashing. Either the threat has been tamed or the speaker's view of it has changed. There is also a small puzzle in the fact that the speaker sits "outside," yet the wave is knocking at a door. The poem doesn't explain this, but it suggests shelter was available and was passed over. Running to safety was an option, and sitting still was chosen over it.
Then there is the title. Nothing in the poem mentions a waffle, so "The Waffle of Life" has to be read as a riddle. It may be a joke, or an ironic contrast, since to "waffle" means to dither, and this poem is about not dithering. The grid of a waffle might also suggest life as a pattern of small squares that fill up with whatever gets poured on. These are guesses, but the odd, almost silly title sits against a serious subject and gives the poem a slightly off-balance charm. The label "Poem #4" hints that it belongs to a numbered sequence, though the text alone can't tell us more.
What makes the poem worth discussing is how much it leaves open. The smile might show real peace or only resignation, since the wave does not go away and the speaker is still overtaken. The poem promises freedom from fear, not safety. Its plain, almost childlike voice carries a hard idea: that you can't always stop what is coming, but you can decide whether to meet it in tears.