Four short lines are enough for Soju to build an entire relationship out of one metaphor: a life as a book. The poem never says who "you" is, but "You gave birth to an empty book" strongly suggests a parent addressed by a grown child. If so, the speaker is the book, a new life whose pages are still blank. Beside it runs a second book, "yours," which ended "before" it reached "its epilogue." Two stories, one just starting and one cut short, overlap only briefly. The central idea is that grief is partly the pain of not being read. The loss is not only that someone has gone, but that they never saw what was written in the life they began.
The word "empty" does a lot of work. On the surface it simply describes a newborn, all potential and no plot. Because the poem is a lament, though, it also carries a flatter, sadder sense, that nothing had yet happened that could be shared. The wish in the third line is therefore smaller and more painful than it first looks. The speaker doesn't ask for the parent to have read the whole book, which couldn't exist yet. They ask for "even but a chapter."
The choice of "epilogue" is telling too. An epilogue comes after the story is over, a quiet winding-down. To say the parent's book ended before even that suggests, judging by the wording, a life that stopped mid-action rather than one that reached a natural close. The poem doesn't explain how or why, and it doesn't need to. The gap between "before" and "epilogue" is enough to imply that the ending came too soon.
The sound and shape of the lines carry the feeling as well. The first two lines are steady and balanced, about eight syllables each, and they state their facts without decoration. There is no end rhyme: "book" and "epilogue" sit side by side without chiming, which keeps the tone plain and unconsoled. Then the third line spills over to twelve syllables, as if the speaker can't hold the thought in the earlier measure. Its phrasing is slightly awkward, with two small words stacked together in "even but a chapter." Each one shrinks the request, as though the speaker keeps lowering what they dare to ask for. The contraction "could've" keeps the voice spoken and unpolished, closer to someone murmuring than someone composing.
Then comes the refrain. "How I wish" opens the third line and is repeated alone as the fourth, which shrinks to three syllables, as though the poem has run out of breath. Repetition stands in for rhyme here. The only echo the poem allows is the speaker's own voice coming back with no reply. The last line also drops the thing being wished for. Only the act of wishing remains, bare and unfinished, and the poem stops on it with no resolution.
The title, "Wish to Stars," adds a final layer. Stars appear nowhere in the text itself, so the poem's words and its title point in different directions. The stars are an outside presence the title brings in, a place to send hopes that can't be delivered in person. Wishing on a star is also a childlike gesture, which fits a speaker who is, in a sense, still the child of the first line. It is reasonable to read the poem itself as the wish being sent upward. The speaker writes a small page, perhaps that missing chapter, for a reader who cannot open it.
What makes the poem worth attention is how much it does with so little. The book metaphor reverses the usual picture, in which children read their parents' stories, and makes the absent parent the reader whose attention is missed. Its restraint also helps. It has no exclamation marks, no catalogue of memories and no attempt to explain the loss. Instead it asks for the smallest thing it can imagine, one chapter, and lets that modest request carry all the weight.