A single phone call is all the poem gives us: two voices, one line, and a distance neither can close. He says he misses her, and she answers that she misses him too. Then he apologises, she asks why, and a silence follows. When she asks if he's okay, his voice starts to break, and he apologises again, this time for crying. The poem ends on her private belief that tears signal strength, not weakness, so what he sees as a failing only makes her love him more.
What drives the poem is the gap between what each person feels and what the other can know. "He calls says I miss you and / has no idea that on the other end / her heart is braking." Her grief is as deep as his, yet it stays hidden. Later the poem turns the same trick on him: "What he doesn't know is / she believes tears are a sign of strength." The speaker sits above the call like a third listener who hears both ends. That is the poem's quiet irony. These two people love each other equally, and the phone keeps each from seeing it. The cause of their separation is left vague, only "through no fault of their own," which suggests circumstances outside their control. We are never told what those circumstances are, and the poem doesn't need them.
The text spells "braking", which is probably a slip for "breaking". The intended word matters, because it is picked up a few lines later when "his voice start[s] to break." Her heart breaks silently and his voice breaks audibly, so the same word links a hidden feeling to a heard one. Almost everything in the poem is sound: "calls," "says," "hear," "voice," "silence." With no faces or gestures on a phone line, the images are all auditory. Her wish "to hold him" is the only physical thing in it, and it is exactly what she cannot do.
The form fits this plainness. There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, and no quotation marks separate speech from narration, so "I miss you too" and "He says I'm sorry" slide into the lines around them as if overheard mid-breath. The short lines and everyday diction sound like talking, and the enjambment ("and / has no idea that on the other end") lets sentences spill over the line breaks the way a halting conversation does. The one moment of figurative language is "a cold silence answers." Silence is given the power to reply, and its coldness contrasts with the warmth of "hold" and "heart." Her question hangs unanswered, and the line shows him withdrawing in embarrassment.
Repetition does much of the emotional work. "Hurt" appears twice, first as what she wants to "take away" and then as what he "tries to hide," so each is trying to ease or conceal the same pain. "More" also recurs. He misses and loves her "more than you'll ever know," and by the end she loves him "even more." His confession of vulnerability does not lower her opinion of him; it raises her love. The title phrase returns in the closing lines, "Those tears were tears from the heart," and works like a verdict on the whole scene. The ending states its idea outright instead of leaving it in the imagery, which some readers may find too neat. It also fits the poem's logic: she has just been shown to be the one person who understands his tears, and the poem needs to say so. We are not told she says it to him, which leaves the comfort stranded on her end of the line.
The poem's significance is modest but real. It takes a common, awkward moment, apologising for crying, and reverses the shame attached to it. His "I'm sorry" is the wrong word for what has happened, and her silent response corrects it. In a few unadorned lines it suggests that what we hide to protect someone may be the very thing they value most in us.