Thirteen syllables, and the first word tells you how to read them. "Funny" here isn't the funny of jokes. It's the funny of "that's odd, I didn't expect that," the word we use when our own feelings have caught us off guard. The speaker mentions the discovery the way you'd mention a coincidence to a friend: *funny thing is.* That offhand tone is the poem's first trick, because what's being admitted isn't small at all.
The central idea is that remembering someone can bring gladness instead of the pain we expect. Nothing in the text says who Maria is or why she's now someone the speaker *thinks about* rather than sees. But the word "still" suggests that time has passed and that a different reaction was possible. "Still" only makes sense against a backdrop of what might have changed. It also does double duty: it means "even now," and it carries a hint of stillness, of something that stays quietly in place. One small word hides a whole unspoken history.
The construction is as bare as the thought. The poem is a single sentence with no comma, no line break and one full stop. Everything is lowercase, even the pronoun "i," which makes the speaker sound as if they are typing quickly or thinking out loud. Nearly every word is one syllable, and only "funny" and "about" take two. The rhythm follows ordinary speech: FUN-ny THING is i STILL SMILE when i THINK a-BOUT YOU. The stresses bunch up in the second half. "Still smile" puts two heavy beats side by side, so the line slows exactly where the smile happens. Then "think about you" runs downhill to a last stressed word. The sentence has been heading toward "you" all along, and it saves her for the end.
There is no rhyme, and a single line has nowhere to put it, but the sound is not careless. "Thing" and "think" almost echo each other, differing by one consonant. The long "i" sound turns up in "i," "smile" and "i" again, so the smile sits between two appearances of the speaker's own pronoun. It's tempting to read that as the speaker holding the smile close, though that is an interpretation, not a fact. The soft "s" sounds of "still smile" add a hushed quality, nothing like a shout of joy.
The poem has no visual imagery in the usual sense. Its only image is the smile, and that choice matters. The speaker doesn't say "I love you" or "I miss you" or even "I'm happy." They describe something the body does, almost involuntarily. A smile is evidence, not a declaration, and it is harder to argue with. The verb "think" is just as plain. It isn't "remember," which would push Maria into the past. "Think about you" is present tense, and "when" makes it a habit: this happens whenever the thought arrives, again and again.
The pronouns change too. The title gives her name, the label other people would use. Inside the poem she becomes "you," which is more intimate and more direct. The speaker talks *to* her, even if she may never hear it. The three asterisks beneath the title look like the usual marker for a poem without a title of its own, so the name "Maria" is all that stands at the door.
The poem matters because of what it leaves out. Poems about absent people are often about ache, and this one puts the ache offstage and shows what remains afterward. Readers can supply their own Maria: a first love, a friend who moved away, someone lost. The line still works because it doesn't insist on any of these stories. The modest claim is part of why it's convincing. The speaker doesn't announce that everything is healed or that the memory is sacred. They only say that something unexpectedly good is still there. A reader might try swapping "still" for "now" and notice how much of the poem's feeling goes with it.