The speaker opens with a quiet admission: the world looks much as they once imagined it, so disillusionment isn't the issue. They also remember who they come from, a mother whose scolding carried a hard lesson. In love, she warned, we often understand the truth too late, and that truth arrives through ordinary, earthy images: grains of wheat, petals of blood. Harvest and wounding sit side by side, suggesting that sustenance and pain are bound together.
The second part widens from the personal to the land itself. Crooked trees and stones seem to control how long a fire burns, a fire that has not been put out "for ages." The poem doesn't say what the fire stands for, but it feels like old anger or injustice that has never been settled. The last lines name who is waiting: the earth and its "scammed owners," people cheated of what is theirs. The mood is weary and restrained, with resentment smoldering beneath the calm tone, and a stubborn sense that the wait is not over.