Happiness is announced in the first line of "I Threw the Supermarket Flowers From the Windowsill" and again in the last, but it never sounds secure. The speaker records one good day with a diary's plainness, and the more closely you read, the more that day looks like something held carefully in both hands.
The title is the strangest thing about it. It promises flowers and a dramatic gesture, a bouquet flung out of a window, yet the poem never mentions either. The only gift in the text is a card. Supermarket flowers are cheap and last-minute, the kind of thing bought in a hurry or out of obligation, so throwing them away suggests disappointment or release. Because the title is in the past tense while the poem insists on "today", it is tempting to read the title as what came after the good day, or what the speaker could not say within it. The poem never confirms this. That gap is part of its tension: the cheerful body of the text sits under a title that hints at something discarded.
The form is as bare as the title is loaded. There is no rhyme and no regular rhythm, just short declarative lines, many of them subject-verb-object: "I talked to you." "You held my hand." "You were nice." The lowercase "i" and the missing apostrophes in "didnt" make it read like a note written quickly, perhaps not meant for anyone else. Even the slip in "But today was good day" feels unpolished in a way that adds to its honesty. The vocabulary is almost childlike, and "nice" and "good" are about as modest as praise gets.
That modesty shapes how the happiness is measured. Look at what the speaker counts as evidence of a good day: "we had to but you didnt protest." "You sat next to me and didnt leave me." Twice, joy is defined by something that did not happen. Dancing is something they "had to" do, which suggests a situation where it was expected, and the speaker's relief is that the other person went along without complaint. Then there is the thank-you card, given "because you put up with me for two years." The phrase "put up with" is revealing. It treats the speaker as a burden who has been tolerated, and the relationship as an act of endurance on the other person's side. The word "leave" works the same way, quietly exposing a fear of abandonment that sits under all the cheerfulness.
The one moment of real balance comes in the three-line chain "You made me laugh / I made you laugh / We both laughed." The grammar here is perfectly symmetrical, and it is the only stretch where the speaker is not thanking, hoping or being tolerated, but giving and receiving equally. The lines get simpler as the feeling grows, which is a neat piece of construction. It is the emotional peak of the poem, and it is followed immediately by a "But."
That "But" appears twice, and it is the poem's hinge. "But today was a good day. / I may have been scared / But today was good day." The speaker is arguing with something unnamed, and the repetition sounds like someone convincing themselves. "May have been scared" is hedged, as though even admitting fear is risky. Meanwhile "today" returns again and again, pinning the happiness to a single day and implying that tomorrow is not guaranteed. The poem ends where it began, with "happy", so the structure becomes a loop. The speaker keeps returning to the one safe conclusion.
What makes the poem worth reading is exactly this restraint. It doesn't explain the fear, the relationship or the flowers, and it trusts small details to carry the weight: a held hand, a card, a shared laugh. The result is a portrait of happiness that is real but anxious, a good day recorded as if it might need to be proved later.