The title is a quoted sentence, «I miss you Gram.», and it doubles as the poem's real first line. The opening line, "brings a tear to my eye everytime", has no subject of its own, so the quoted words must be what does the bringing. The speaker can't think or say this one sentence without being overwhelmed by it, and everything that follows is an attempt to explain why.
The explanation is a knot. The speaker knows they should "let go", and those words come back like a refrain, but they refuse. The reason comes late and is surprisingly logical: friends advise crying, yet the speaker fears that "her memeory will pass quicker." Tears are imagined as a kind of erosion, so grief becomes a way of guarding the grandmother rather than a pain to be rid of. Holding on feels like loyalty, and the speaker also calls it selfish, even "internal treason". That phrase borrows its language from politics and puts the speaker on trial. The poem turns on this double charge: the refusal to grieve is both an act of love and a betrayal of the grandmother's own wishes.
The poem is free verse, with short lines and no regular beat, but small rhymes surface at telling moments. "I didn't cry, I don't know why" and "mainly for selfish reasons / more like an internal treason" both sound like someone trying to tie off an explanation neatly. "My heart aches / I can't escape" does the opposite, trapping the speaker inside the rhyme. Repetition does similar work. "I know / I know / I know your ok" is spread over three lines so that it reads as a stutter, as if the speaker were trying to convince themselves. "Know" runs through the whole poem, and the gap between knowing and feeling is its real subject. The speaker understands everything, including the guilt, and still can't act, which is why the line "I'm sorry gram I can't can't do it yet" stumbles on its doubled word.
Tense is handled just as carefully. "You were / you are / my grandmother" is split across three short lines, and the quick correction from past to present is the poem's whole argument in miniature. Likewise "I don't speak of you / but I think of you" sets silence against thought, so that the speaker's quiet is shown to be full.
Imagery is sparse, and what there is stays close to home. The "dreams you sent to comfort me" are a gift that "hurt me", because comfort that comes only in sleep also reminds the speaker of the absence. The speaker reads the dreams as a message that it's time to "let go", and that makes them harder to bear. The childhood details, "I spent everyday of my childhood in your house / I played in the yard", are plain, almost like a list, and that plainness is what makes the next lines land: "it won't be the same to go back without you." Then comes a question that is nearly childlike: "where would I run too". A child in trouble would run to this house, but now the house is the thing to be avoided.
The surface of the poem is unpolished. The "i" is sometimes lowercase, "your" stands in for "you're", "memeory" is misspelled, and a stray backslash sits after "you". Judging by these, it reads as something written quickly and left as it came. Whether or not that was deliberate, it suits the poem, which never smooths its feelings into a tidy shape.
That honesty is what makes it worth reading. Most poems about death lean toward consolation, but this one admits something less flattering and more common: grief can be stubborn, and it can disguise itself as devotion. The ending offers no resolution. "I know it's selfish. I do. / but I love you." The little word "but" is both an excuse and a confession, and the poem leaves the speaker, and the reader, with it.