Eleven words, and a whole family story seems to fit inside them. Catherine B. Krause's "Goals" gives us two people and two ambitions, set side by side so that the gap between them does most of the talking. Mom wants a degree. Dad wants Mom. The poem sounds like a child summing up where they came from, though the text only hints at this: "Mom" and "dad" are what a son or daughter would call them, and the speaker never steps forward to say more.
The poem's central idea lies in the difference between what the two goals are. Mom's is an achievement, something she can do herself, in an institution, through effort: "to graduate college." It has a verb in it, a process, a finish line. Dad's goal has no verb at all. He doesn't want to *win* or *marry* her, only "mom," a person offered up as a destination. The grammar quietly turns a human being into an object of pursuit, and it also makes Dad's ambition smaller and bigger at once. It is smaller because it needs no diploma, and bigger because it depends on someone else's yes.
The little word "but" holds the poem's tension. It suggests the two goals pull in different directions, or at least that Dad's is a surprising swerve after Mom's sensible one. Yet the poem never says they clashed. Both verbs are in the past tense, "was" and "was," so the reader is left to wonder how things turned out. The speaker calls them Mom and dad, which suggests that at least one goal was reached. Whether Mom got her degree stays unsaid. That silence is where a reader's imagination goes to work, and it may be where the poem is most pointed: a goal can be achieved, set aside, or folded into someone else's, and the poem won't tell us which.
The poem's construction is plain, but it is not careless. There is no rhyme, and no regular meter, but the rhythm still does something. The first line is long, at about nine syllables, and ends on the stately, many-syllabled "graduate college." The second line is barely half that length and ends on a single flat syllable, "mom." After the weight of the first line, the second drops almost like a punchline. The poem also circles back on itself. It begins with "Mom's" and ends with "mom," so she stands at both ends of the poem, with Dad's wanting wedged between. Whether that reads as tender or as a little smothering depends on the reader.
Notice the capitalization, too. "Mom's" is capitalized because it starts the poem, but "dad's" and the final "mom" are lowercase. That shift is small, and it may be only a casual, speech-like style, but it has an effect. By the end, "mom" reads less like a title of respect and more like an ordinary noun, a thing you can name as a target. The informality fits the everyday voice of the poem, which says "graduate college" without a "from," as people actually talk.
The key word is the one in the title, repeated in each line: "goal." It's a flexible word. It can mean an ambition, a life plan, the thing on a school worksheet that says *Write three goals*. It also carries a faint sporting echo, the net at the end of the field, which makes Dad's wanting sound like a chase. The plural title, "Goals," widens the picture. These are two separate lives with separate aims, brought together in a single poem as they were, presumably, brought together in a single household. Today, "goals" is also a casual shorthand for what we admire or want to have, and that adds a faint wink to the title.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks of its reader with how little it says. It sets personal growth against romantic devotion without ranking them. It may touch on how different ambitions get valued in families, though the text doesn't push that point. And the two-line form is a lesson in compression: the joke, the affection, and the unanswered questions all arrive in the space of a breath. Read quickly, it is a charming one-liner. Read slowly, it asks what it means to want something, who gets to be the subject of that wanting, and what happens when one person's goal is another person's whole life.