Jessea L. Vaughan's speaker looks back at a time when dreaming of a peaceful world felt natural. They imagined a day without war, violence or hatred, a day when people might set their differences aside, even briefly. The poem is built almost entirely from the phrase "I used to," repeated until it sounds like a list of lost beliefs. Each line adds another hope, and the past tense tells us from the start that these hopes have faded.
The turn comes near the end, with "those were the days / Before it all changed." The poem never says what changed, and that gap lets readers fill it in with their own disappointments. What the speaker takes away is a bitter lesson: "The things you want the most / Are the things you can't expect." The mood is quiet, wistful and a little defeated. There is no anger here, only the sadness of someone who has learned to stop waiting, though the poem itself still shows how much the speaker cared.