Still-Birth Pantoum

The speaker in this poem is a mother who lost a child while giving birth. Later, down the road of life, the mother is speaking to the dead child in a way that isn't that uncommon. Many have been known to talk to lost loved ones in a way that could be helping them to get over their grief (how can you be dead, why did you have to leave me, etc). The speaker feels that she has to speak to her dead daughter because, while she is at the train station, she hears someone calling "No, Laetitia, no." (probably a mother calling to a young child to be careful around the train tracks). Laetitia is the name of the daughter that the speaker lost many years ago. And, in her grief at losing her daughter, she feels she has to talk to her. The speaker knows it wasn't her time to have a child ("It wasn't my train- the doors were closing."), but whether she accepts that is a different story. The speaker's grief has slowly eased up over time ("Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space."), but it will never completely go away.
If you look at the words at the end of each line (name, no, closing, face, you, thirty-two, chosen, attached, space), they can probably tell us more than we would catch by just reading the poem. The name that was called out on the platform at the train station is what triggered the mother's memory of her dead baby and makes her want to seek out her child. "No" could be read to suggest the mother's denial at first that her child is dead, and possibly her denial even now. "closing" could be the speaker's grasp on reality. She is slowly losing her mind over the grief of losing something that she lost so long ago. The face of her still-born child is what is haunting her every waking moment and it is what she is looking for now on the train. The speaker looks for the face of her child in a woman on the train, but she doesn't find what she is looking for. The use of "you" in this poem suggests that the speaker could have been one of those mothers who lost their first baby, and even though she had others after that, she could never quite give them the love that she had for that first dead baby. "Thirty-two" tells us the age that the speaker's child would be now and it also tells us for how long this mother has been grieving for her lost daughter. The speaker had already "chosen" the name for her daughter, but what she didn't choose was a life without the daughter that she had prepared so long for. The use of "attached" in this poem tells us that the speaker didn't follow the advice to not get attached, and because of that, she feels a "space" in her life that has never been filled by anything else. It has just stayed empty.