"Why me" comes before anything has happened, two words with no question mark. Douglas Hozea starts "Of Lost Love" with the grief already in place, then spends the rest of the poem walking backwards to show how it got there. By the time we reach friends who "talked all day" and lay in the grass, we know the warmth is on loan.
What follows is a portrait of a friendship so easy that it hides what it really is. They "kept each other / Company at home," knelt together "just to pray," and lay in the grass looking for "our matching / Bright stars." That is the poem's one moment of lyrical imagery, and "matching" does quiet work. It is couples' language, used by two people who believe they are only friends. "Blinded by friendship" sums up the irony: closeness lets the speaker see the other person clearly, yet stops them seeing what the closeness means. When "people said we had / To try and date," the idea goes into "a big case." The poem never says what the case holds, but the image suggests something stored away, kept safe, and never opened.
The sound of the poem follows the same arc. There is no punctuation and no fixed rhyme scheme, but the first half chimes: "day," "days," "stay," "pray," "say." That -ay echo gives the friendship a gentle, almost musical steadiness. Once the grass and stars are behind us, the chime goes. The morning text and its near-rhyme with "step" feel less settled. Then rhyme returns once, hard, in "call" and "all." It lands on the word that delivers the news. The early "all day" has become "us all," the people left behind, and the shift is small enough to miss and painful once noticed.
Small repeated words carry a lot here. "Just" appears three times: "Just to pray," "Just to see your text," "Just after a few minutes." The first is gentle, the second hopeful, and the third is the blow, because the happiness lasts only minutes. "Saying" also appears three times. People are "saying" that the two should date, the text is "Saying i love you," and the call is "Saying you had left." In each case language delivers something, first public opinion, then love, then death. The poem is full of talk ("talked," "words," "text," "call"), yet the speaker's own words are the ones missing. They "didn't have / Words to say" to their crush, and the poem records no reply to the text. If the crush and the friend are the same person, as the poem suggests, then the silence after "i love you" is the saddest gap on the page.
The grammar slows the ending down. "Full of smiles was i" and "Did i receive a call" both turn the normal word order around. Judging by the effect, this holds the sentence back, as if the speaker were postponing the news even while telling it. The final phrase, "a better place," is a stock comfort, and the poem never says "died." It sounds like the words of the person on the phone rather than a consolation the speaker has found for themselves. Nothing follows it, no reflection and no full stop. "Me and us all" is also an odd phrase. It separates "me" from "us," and it may hint that the "us" the speaker lost includes the couple they never became.
The poem is worth reading because it trusts plain language. It has no elaborate metaphors, just short lines and everyday details like a text, a phone call and grass. The grief comes from timing and from the order of events: a confession, a smile, and a few minutes. Its idea is hard but true: love can sit inside friendship unnoticed, and what goes unsaid may stay unsaid. The poem makes that feel urgent without ever telling the reader what to feel.