Most poems about crying begin with the sorrow. Nikky's begins with its absence from the speaker's mind. "Some nights I just lay there," it opens, and the tears arrive without being noticed: "a soft stream trickling down my ever so soft cheeks, / Although I do not realise it is there." Only when the speaker reaches up and touches their face does the poem turn. In that second, the hand is "stained with all my thoughts and all my realisations." The central idea is that the body can know something before the mind admits it. The speaker has to find out what they feel by reading the evidence on their own skin.
The poem is only five lines long, so every word counts. Start with the title, "TEARS." in capitals, closed off with a full stop. It sounds blunt and final, like a label or a diagnosis, which contrasts with the gentleness of what follows. The opening line has the same plainness. "Some nights" suggests a habit rather than a single crisis, and "just" makes the lying there sound passive, even weary. The speaker is not described as sobbing or breaking down. They simply stay put. The line also borrows the easy grammar of speech ("I just lay there"), so it feels like a confession made quietly to someone nearby, not a performance.
The second line is where the language becomes most tender. "Soft" appears twice, first for the stream and then for the cheeks, and the repetition has a cushioning effect. Add "ever so," a phrase from everyday, almost childlike speech, and the speaker seems to be looking at themselves with gentleness, perhaps even pity. Sound reinforces this. The s-sounds in "soft stream trickling" hiss quietly, like water running slowly, and "trickling" itself is a slow word that the tongue has to pick its way through. The line is also the longest of the opening three, and it stretches as the tears do. The speaker's repeated "I lay there" in the same line adds to the stillness, almost like a stutter.
The third line holds the poem's quiet paradox. "Although" suggests a contradiction. The tears are present and the speaker is unaware, as if the feeling has outrun the speaker's understanding. This reads like numbness, or the habit of not looking at one's own sadness. The poem never says what the sadness is about, and it doesn't need to. Leaving it blank lets the reader place their own cause there.
Then comes the turn. "I take a second to touch my cheek" is short and deliberate, a small act of attention. The next line is the longest in the poem and begins with a lowercase "and," as though the sentence is spilling over from the one before. The phrasing "it is in that moment that" slows everything down and points to the instant when awareness arrives. Here the poem's most striking image appears. Tears are clear and leave no mark, but the speaker's hand is "stained." A stain is dark and lasting, closer to ink than to water. The tears become a kind of writing, and the hand carries "all my thoughts and all my realisations" like a page. There is also a quiet echo in the word choice. The speaker "do[es] not realise" in line three, and "realisations" appear in the last line. The same word moves from denial to arrival, and the poem's entire movement is packed into that shift.
The poem is significant because it takes a very small gesture, touching your own face, and makes it a moment of self-discovery. It has no rhyme and no ornate vocabulary. It trusts one metaphor and a simple structure that builds toward a single insight. The result is both modest and true to experience, since most people have at some point felt something fully only when it became undeniable. By the end, the reader may feel they have touched their own cheek too.