Nobody in this story gets a name. The girl is only "this girl," a phrase repeated so often that it works like a refrain, and she keeps the label even when she is old and "wrinkles marked her face." That choice makes her less a particular person than a figure from a fable, someone who stands for a kind of goodness rather than a single life. The title, "This Story is About a Girl," sets up that storytelling mood, as if the poem were being told aloud and its moral were waiting at the end.
The opening gives her almost nothing: a father's baseball cap and a mother's wedding band "that she kept on a string / Tied to her wrist." The ring is a small, painful image, a family bond reduced to something she can physically tie to herself so it won't be lost. The cap never appears again, and the poem doesn't explain it. Her loss is simply stated and left alone. From there the poem turns on a reversal. She is invisible to everyone ("people never looked at her"), yet she is the one who truly looks. Her attention is the poem's real subject, and what she sees is striking. Goodness "shone out of some like a star / But was hidden in others," while pain "scoured itself along people's shame." The verb "scoured" is rough and physical, as if shame were something that scrapes. The list of what she notices ("the happiness / And the depression / And the hope") is stitched together with repeated "And"s, so everything arrives at once, with no ranking of good and bad.
There is no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines run at the pace of speech, mostly plain declarative sentences, and that plainness suits a poem about unshowy kindness. The line breaks do quiet work. "Forgot her," sits alone, and the long adverb that follows it ("Almost instantaneously") is the most formal-sounding phrase in the poem. It makes the forgetting feel brisk and total. Her kindnesses are given as a list of verbs: wipe, carry, give, smile. In the second half the poem repeats them almost word for word ("Carry those who were tired"), now set against a failing body: lungs heavy, muscles giving out, bones weak. The repetition is the point. Her body changes, but what she does doesn't.
One small shift deserves attention. Early on, she smiles at people who "had done horrible things." Near the end, she smiles at "those who seemed evil." The change from fact to appearance fits her way of seeing, because she looks past the surface to "the scars that hid their kindness." Her generosity doesn't depend on whether people deserve it, only on what she perceives beneath them.
The ending depends on a pattern. Her last acts are "To take her last breath / To grin her last smile / And to shed her last tear." All through the poem she wipes away other people's tears, and this is the first time her own is mentioned. After a life of tending to others, she finally has one. Then comes the payoff the poem has been withholding: "She never received a word of thanks," until the world itself "whisper[s] in her ear; / Thank you." The thanks comes quietly, in two words on their own line, from everyone at once rather than from any one person. It also comes only when she is dying, which stings a little, since nobody thanked her when it could have mattered.
The poem's strength is its simplicity, though it sometimes tells us she is "special" where it could show it. It makes a clear case that goodness doesn't need an audience or a reward, and it offers a gentle challenge to the reader: the people we fail to notice may be the ones noticing us. The unpolished edges, like "wondered about" for wandering, even suit the voice, which sounds like someone telling a story sincerely rather than performing one.