The most telling mark in these two lines is the comma at the end of the title. "One Year Ago Today," doesn't stand apart from the poem the way titles usually do. It leans forward into the first line, so that title and text run together as a single sentence: *One year ago today, I didn't know how much things would change.* The poem has already begun before we reach the poem. That small piece of punctuation sets the mood of a speaker who cannot name the date without being pulled into everything that has happened since.
What the poem is about is hindsight, and the gap between a person and their own earlier self. "Today" is the same day on the calendar, but the speaker who says "I" is not the one who lived it a year ago. The central idea sits in the grammar of the second line. "And why I'd wish they hadn't" is a fragment, but it hangs from the same verb as the first line, "didn't know." The speaker didn't know how much would change, and also didn't know *why* they would come to wish it undone. The sting is not just that life shifted. It is that the speaker has ended up wanting something they could not have imagined wanting.
The sound of the lines supports this. The first is steady, nine syllables with about four strong beats: *I DID-n't KNOW how MUCH things WOULD change.* It ends on the heavy, stressed word "change," which lands like a door closing. The second line is shorter, seven syllables, and it falters at the end. "Hadn't" is an unstressed finish, so the voice drops instead of landing. There is no rhyme, and "change" and "hadn't" make no attempt to chime, which leaves the poem unresolved. The two contractions, "didn't" and "hadn't," also work as bookends. Each is a negative, and together they mark the speaker's two kinds of lack: not knowing, and wanting something not to have happened.
The most interesting choice is a word that never appears. "Hadn't" what? The obvious answer is "changed," but the speaker uses that word once and will not say it again. The sentence trails off and leaves the reader to supply it. Silence does the work that description might have done elsewhere. The poem's one abstract noun, "things," is just as vague. It doesn't say what changed, whether people, places or circumstances, and it doesn't even say the change was for the worse. We infer that from "wish they hadn't," but a wish like that can attach to a good change that cost something as easily as to a bad one. The only concrete images are measures of time, "a year" and "today." The poem pictures nothing, and that absence reads as a choice: some things are too large or too private to be given a picture.
Notice, too, the quiet time-travel in the verbs. "Would change" and "I'd wish" (that is, "I would wish") both look forward from last year's vantage point, while the knowledge behind them belongs to the present. The speaker stands in the past and glances ahead with today's eyes. That produces a gentle dramatic irony aimed at oneself, almost tender toward the person who didn't know. The word "why" does something similar. It promises reasons and then withholds them, so we feel the weight of the explanation without being given any of it. And "wish" is the poem's only emotional verb. A wish about the past is the most helpless kind, since nothing can be done with it.
We know nothing about the writer beyond the handle Pun_Related, and the poem gives no circumstances, so it has to stand on its own. That seems to be part of its strength. Because "things" is left unnamed, any reader can fill the gap with their own year, their own date and their own loss. The brevity also feels true to how memory works. We rarely carry a whole story around; we carry one sentence we can say aloud, and a second one, an afterthought, that turns out to be heavier than the first. The final fragment, starting with "And," feels like exactly that: the speaker thinks they've said all they can, then admits there's more.