"There once was a girl" is how a fairy tale begins, and Nikky borrows that opening to unsettling effect. We expect a princess, a quest, a happy ending. What we get is a character who does nothing but cry. The third-person distance ("a girl," not "I") makes the poem sound like a story told in a quiet, flat voice, and that calm is what makes it hurt. No cause for the sadness is given, no loss and no event. The girl could be anyone, and the poem cares less about why she cries than about what is left once the crying has used her up.
The first stanza works by repetition. "She cried all the time, / She cried all night," and then "She'd cry all morning": the sentences are built almost identically, so the reading feels like the girl's days, with no variety and no relief. The poem sweeps around the clock, from night to sleep to morning, and the loop has no exit. Line four, "Falling asleep with tears in her eyes," is the only line that gives us a picture rather than a statement, and it is a tender one. Sleep, which should be rest, begins with wet eyes, and then "once she got up" the cycle starts again.
The stanza ends with exaggeration: "She cried so much her tear ducts dried up..." The clinical phrase "tear ducts" jars against the fairy-tale opening, as though a medical fact had wandered into a bedtime story. The claim is hyperbole, but it gives the crying a logical endpoint, the moment the body simply runs out. The trailing ellipsis leaves the line hanging, as if the poem were waiting to see whether the story can end there. It can't.
The second stanza supplies the turn, and the sound of the poem turns with it. The first stanza has no regular rhyme, though a long *i* echoes through "time," "night" and "eyes." Then comes the poem's only true rhyme: "dry" and "cry." The two words are opposites in meaning but locked together in sound, which is exactly the contradiction the stanza describes. The long *i* returns once more in the final word, "inside," so the poem ends on the same sound it has been holding all along, like a note that won't fade. Whether Nikky planned this or not, the effect is of a cry that continues without tears.
The wording is careful about what can be known. "Somehow she still seemed to cry" belongs to an observer who can't quite explain what they see. "Somehow" admits bafflement, and "seemed" hints that what is visible is only an appearance. The real reason sits behind the next line break, introduced by a single word and an ellipsis: "Because..." That pause is the poem's quietest moment. The reader waits, and the answer, "She was nothing but broken inside," arrives in plain language and as the longest line of the second stanza. "Nothing but" is total. It suggests no part of the girl is left that isn't damage. The movement of the poem also becomes clear here: it starts at the eyes, the visible and outward part of sorrow, and ends *inside*, where nobody can see.
Some readers may find "broken inside" a well-worn phrase, and it is. Yet the plainness fits. After so much repetition the poem has no decoration left, and the flat final line reads like exhaustion, as though even the language has run dry. The subtitle, spelled "encoure" in the text, seems to mean "encore," a repeat performance. Whether or not that was the intention, it suits a poem about sorrow that keeps coming back for another round, and about a poem that circles the same subject.
What makes the piece worth reading is the idea packed into those few lines: tears are a symptom, not the wound itself. When the crying stops, the pain doesn't necessarily stop with it. For a school audience, that is a useful thing to notice. A person with dry eyes and a calm face may still be struggling, and a poem this short and plain can say so without any grand language.