"Fair" is a playground word. Children use it when a slice of cake is cut unevenly or someone else gets the first turn. Samantha Harper puts it at the centre of her poem and repeats it until it carries far more weight than it was made for. The speaker is not arguing about cake. She is addressing someone who has recovered from a loss while she has not, and the poem never says what that loss is. We learn only that "what made up my childhood is gone" and that an "old life has been sealed away." It could be a family breaking apart, a death, or a friendship, and the text refuses to decide. That vagueness works in the poem's favour, because the subject is the feeling rather than the event. Its central idea is that grief can sour into envy of the people who heal, and that this envy is a kind of admiration the speaker cannot yet admit.
The opening shows how childish and how desperate the complaint is. Happiness is something "you get to be," as if it were a prize handed out by a referee, and attention is something "she" receives while the speaker has been "wanting" it "for years." The first stanza trails off into ellipses, "I'm still here... / suffering..without you...", and the dots feel like a voice dragging itself along. Notice, too, that even while she accuses, the speaker is still addressing the person she says has left her behind. The anger is a way of staying in contact.
The middle of the poem turns to sarcasm. "Lucky you!" and "Good for you!" arrive with exclamation marks that sound bright and are really clenched. The rhyme of "healed" and "sealed" gives these lines a sing-song, mocking chant, and the two words pull against each other. To heal is to open up and recover, but to seal is to shut something in, like a jar or a tomb. The speaker suggests that the other person's "healing" may simply be the past being closed off, with her left outside the lid.
Then the mood shifts from taunting to something quieter and sadder. "Am I to suffer a different fate? / One where all I do is wait?" rhymes again, this time like a door closing on her. The next words, "comfortable / happy / content," are each given a line of their own, and the slowing is deliberate. They read like stops on a route the speaker is waiting at, and the question that follows, "wait to be happy again?", carries its heaviest word at the end. "Again" admits that happiness once existed and now seems to belong to someone else's life. The anger sharpens in "How dare you wear that tearable happy smile." Wearing a smile makes it a costume, something put on for show. "Tearable" is an odd word. It may be a slip for "terrible," but it also holds the word "tear," so the smile seems to be the kind that could rip, or that could make someone cry. The rhyme of "face" with "place" pins the smile directly to the events it seems to ignore.
The final stanza is the poem's real turn. The exclamation marks vanish and the lines shorten into a plain list: "I envy you / your strength / your resilience / your ability to get back up again." The grammar sets up a quiet contrast. The speaker's verb has been "wait," while the other person's verb is "get back up." What looked like contempt now looks like longing for someone who is moving. Even the final line shifts register, from the formal "I wish it were me" to the more casual "I wish I was happy like you," as if the speaker's composure slips as she speaks.
The poem is frank about its own purpose. Its subtitle, "a poem of envy," names the emotion before we begin, and the date in the title makes the piece feel like a diary entry. The rough edges, such as "cant" without an apostrophe and the doubled "??", keep it unpolished and urgent rather than composed after the feeling has passed. That rawness is its strength. Many poems about loss reach for consolation, while this one admits something harder to say aloud: that it is possible to resent someone's recovery and to admire it in the same breath. It ends in a wish rather than a resolution, which feels truthful to the state it describes.