Almost every line of "Her poetry" is built on a quiet swap of roles. At the start, the speaker is the one who receives: she tells him to make a wish, she wakes him with kisses, she writes him poetry. By the end he is alone, waking up missing her and writing the poetry himself. The poem is about a relationship cooling, but it never says so directly. It shows a set of small daily rituals, each one handed over from her to him as she drifts out of reach.
The construction is simple and neat. The first eight lines work as a mirror. Three "She used to…" lines are answered by three "I used to…" lines, so that every gesture of hers has a matching response from him. She says make a wish, and he makes one. She wakes him with kisses, and he wakes "sweetly". She writes, and he reads. The repeated "used to" does double duty. It describes a happy routine, and it also announces that the routine is over. By the time the poem says "But now", the reader already knows what is coming.
The second half breaks the pattern. The tidy pairing stops, and what replaces it is absence. "She's never home" and "she's already gone" are flat, short statements with no explanation attached. The poem does not say where she goes or why, and it does not blame her. That restraint is one of its strengths. Judging by the language, the speaker is more bewildered than angry, and the plain wording lets the reader feel the gap without being told how to feel about it.
The two time details carry most of the emotion. 11:11 is a minute people treat as lucky, a moment for a small private wish. In the first half it is shared, since she is the one who reminds him. In the second half it is empty: she is not home, and he "always forget[s] to wish." It is easy to read that forgetting as a sign that the wish only worked with her there. The other time detail is morning. The word "wake" appears three times, and it changes meaning each time. At first he is woken by someone, then he wakes "sweetly", and finally he wakes alone, "missing her." Mornings began as the warmest part of the day and have become the place where her absence is most obvious, because "by the time I wake / She's already gone."
Poetry follows the same arc. It is first something she gives him, then something he reads, then something that has faded: "her poetry isn't like it used to be." The poem leaves that comment open. It might mean her writing has become colder, or less often aimed at him, or simply different, and the speaker's disappointment is clear either way. Then comes the last line, the longest and most important: "And now I'm the one who writes poetry about her." The sentence is the poem we have just read. The speaker's loss has turned him from a reader of love poems into a writer of them, so the poem proves its own claim as it ends.
This gives the title, "Her poetry", a slightly ironic edge. It names what he has lost, but the thing we are actually holding is his poetry, and it is still about her. Even the final word is "her." The roles have reversed, but she remains the centre of his attention.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and almost no decoration. Its short lines sound like speech, and the repeated "And" at the start of several lines makes the losses pile up one after another. The vocabulary is ordinary, with no elaborate metaphors, and that suits the subject. Intimacy is made of small habits like a kiss, a wish, or a few lines left to read, and the poem's significance lies in how clearly it shows those habits disappearing. It also suggests, without overstating it, that grief can produce something: when no one is left to write to him, he starts writing to her.