Waking up to sunlight is about as ordinary as an experience gets, and Vlada Onica begins exactly there, with a warm face on a quiet morning. What turns the ordinary into a poem is that the speaker cannot feel the sun without feeling a person. Light on the cheeks becomes "his touch," then a memory of "your fingers," then kisses on the lips "as gently as you used to / All the time." For a few lines the poem is pure nostalgia, a body remembering what the mind would rather forget. Then it turns sharply, and its real subject appears. It is less about longing for a lost lover than about a bitter comparison between the sun's generosity and that lover's selfishness.
The form suits this. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no steady metre. The lines are short and uneven, and they break where a person might pause for breath. Almost no punctuation interrupts them, so the poem reads like a thought spoken aloud soon after waking. Enjambment does real work. "Rays of sunshine kissed" stops on the verb, so the kiss hangs for a beat before we learn where it lands. "All the time" sits alone on its own line, and the isolation makes it ache. The phrase tells us how routine the tenderness once was, and by standing apart it shows how absent that tenderness is now.
The central metaphor is the sun as the beloved, and the poem lets the two blur. The sun is "his" in one line, then an "it" that "smells just like you." A smell is a strange thing for sunlight to have, which suggests the speaker is not describing the sun at all but pouring a person into it. "Star powder" is the most inventive phrase. A star is exactly what the sun is, so the lover and the thing in the sky become one substance, and the smell, the sense most tied to memory, carries them both. Then the speaker slides from "I" into a general "you": love and star powder "can / Drive you crazy like a drug." The drug simile is a quiet confession. The attachment feels wonderful, but it is also a dependency, and the speaker knows it.
The turn comes with "slapped me to reality," and the verb is deliberately violent. After "kissed" and "gently," the same parts of the body, cheeks and lips, are suddenly struck. What does the slapping is not the sun but a thought about it: the sun "Gave every single heart a bit of warmth." The key words are "every single" and "a bit." The sun's love is unselective and unpossessive, given freely and without cost. Against that stands the lover, who "Wanted to win another's heart / By breaking mine." "Win" and "breaking" turn love into a contest in which someone has to lose. The "sadly," tucked between commas, slows the line like a sigh before a verdict. The poem then ends on "mine," the speaker's only possessive after all those "your"s and "his." It is a small, wounded word to finish on.
The title, "Another's Sun," is deliberately ambiguous. Judging by the poem, it may mean that the warmth the speaker once enjoyed now shines on someone else. It may also mean the speaker has been borrowing a sun that was never theirs. Either way, it admits what the opening lines try to avoid: the light belongs elsewhere now.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles a comparison that could easily have become a cliché. Love as sunlight is an old and comfortable idea, and the poem begins by indulging it. But it turns the comparison into an accusation, because the sun becomes the standard of generous love and the beloved fails it. The language is plain, even a little worn in places, yet the plainness suits a speaker who has been caught mid-daydream by an unwelcome truth. For students, it is a useful example of how one image can flatter and condemn in the same breath, and of how a shift in a single verb can change the temperature of a poem.