Explication of "Picnic, Lightning"

In the poem "Picnic, Lightning" by Billy Collins, the speaker is a girl named Lolita and Collins writes about her recount of her mother dying of a freak accident when she was three years old. This tragedy is revealed in an epigraph before the poem begins. This epigraph helps reders to understand the poem and the tone of the speaker.

Being struck by "Picnic lightning" is almost unheard of yet this is the tragedy that resulted in the death of the speaker's mother. Therefore the speaker goes on to mention other ridiculous ways that life can be taken from us. The tone of the poem is very cynical and pessimistic, the speaker seems to be bitter towards life after the tragic loss of her mother. She believes that if this atrocity could have happened so many years ago, then there is no telling what other possible seemingly harmless things could actually be life threatening. It seems as though the speaker lives her life in fear ever since the sudden death of her young mother.

The speaker relates her gardening to her outlook on life later in the poem. The girl talks about gardening flowers and flowers are representative of fragility. The speaker sees life as extremely fragile  as she has seen it taken away in a brief moment by something very strange and unexpected. Based on this, she creates a metaphor between this feeling and her gardening going on to talk about the life that exists within the soil which is representative of how life goes on and she has to learn to live with the tragedy she experienced at a young age. It seems as though the speaker is not really living life, she is just being careful and watching the hours go by on the sundial as she gardens. The tragic loss of the life of the mother has also resulted in the loss of life within this girl.