Three asterisks stand where a title should be, which suits a poem about something the speaker would rather not name. Martina Rakar begins with an ordinary, modern annoyance: a song shuffles on. By the end it has become an ambush. The poem is about avoidance and why it fails. The speaker has tried to manage a painful memory by burying a song at the bottom of a playlist, "hoping I'd never listen as far as that." But memory is not a file that can be filed away. It lives in the body and arrives through the ears whenever the music decides.
The poem's structure is built on repetition. Eleven lines begin with "That song," and the demonstrative matters. It is "that," never "this": the speaker holds the song at arm's length, as one might point at something dangerous. The verbs also show the speaker losing control. The song "comes on," then "talks to me," then "makes me" feel things, then "reminds me." Each time the song acts and the speaker is acted upon. There is no rhyme scheme and no steady metre. The lines run short and long as speech does, and that suits a confession. The one real chime, "quiver" and "shiver," arrives exactly when the body starts to shake, as though the sound itself were trembling.
The central image comes next, and it is the most physical writing in the poem. "Icy hands" reach "in through my ears," then claw the neck, hold the spine, press the lungs and grip the heart. The movement is steadily downward and inward, ending at the soul, which is "hiding, trembling" like a frightened animal. The participles (reaching, clawing, holding, pressing, gripping) never settle into a main verb, so the sentence seems to hang in mid-grasp, never released. Music is usually treated as a comfort, and here it is an intruder that enters through the one door the speaker cannot close.
The middle of the poem turns from the body to the people involved. "That song reminds me of You" is followed by a careful balance: "What you were, what you are, / what I was when I was with you / What I am now I am without you." The grammar mirrors a relationship that has split in two. The surprise is the next line: "That song reminds me of Me." The capital letters make the speaker as much a lost person as the "You." What the song brings back is a younger self, the one who was "17 years old," with her closed-mouth smile ("Always smiled without teeth"), her nervous habit of pulling her hair and playing with her rings. These small, specific gestures do more than any grand statement of grief could.
The most revealing detail is the writing: "Writing to you almost every night / Just to check, if you'd reply." "Just to check" tries to make a hope sound casual, and the stray comma suggests a hesitation. Then comes the plainest line in the poem, with no ornament and no full stop: "You don't write me anymore." After all the imagery of clawing hands, the pain lands in a flat, everyday sentence.
The ending returns to the opening but changes it slightly. "I've banished" becomes "is banished," so the speaker no longer even claims to be the one doing the banishing. "Hoping I'd never listen" becomes "Hoping I'll never listen," and then adds "Ever again." The last words hold a small irony: the song has already come on again, so the hope is the same one that has just failed. The poem is circular, and the reader senses the whole episode will repeat the next time the playlist reaches its end.
The poem's significance lies in this honesty about how loss actually behaves. It does not explain why the relationship ended or who is to blame, and it gives no consoling resolution. It trusts a small, recognisable moment, a song at the wrong time, to carry the whole weight of longing. Many readers will recognise that moment, which is what gives the poem its force.