Sunlight is usually the good news in a poem, so it is startling that the first thing it does here is make the speaker "choke." Waking up, the speaker is hit by a memory of a morning spent with someone else: sounds blending, light bending, a hand reaching toward skin. The poem then ends by defining regret as the knowledge that this touch happened "for the last time." Its central idea is that regret is not a dramatic event but a lingering one. A happy memory becomes painful because it cannot be undone, and because it keeps arriving, uninvited, in ordinary daylight.
The poem goes by the name "wordsforghosts," and nothing is supplied about who wrote it or when, so the text is all there is to read. The name does fit a poem about a past that will not leave, though that is only a suggestion. The poem itself gives no names, no explanation of what ended, and no reason for the regret. That silence helps it. We know the feeling exactly and the story not at all, which leaves room for any reader's own "lives that could have been."
The construction is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no regular beat. The poem is shaped instead by pace. The first stanza is one long, breathless sentence, opening mid-thought with "& then when," as though the memory has already started before the poem begins. The ampersands add to this sense of things spilling into each other. Lines like "I awoke" and "I remembered" are cut short, so the reader feels the jolt of waking and recalling. Then the sentence relaxes into soft, flowing sounds: the "gentle susurration" (a whispering, rustling noise) that "blended / with the birdsong." The word "blended" comes back a few lines later, when "poison blends with pollen." The echo is deliberate. The same verb that described a peaceful morning also describes something harmful mixed into something fertile, as if the sweetness and the damage were never separable.
That poison-and-pollen image is the strangest and most revealing in the poem. The skin being touched contains both, so the person remembered is both harm and life, and the happiness was already tangled with its ending. The flowers deepen this. They "blossom before I pluck them," and the speaker picks them anyway, to put in a lover's hair "where / they will wither & die." The tenderness is real, but so is the speaker's knowledge, even then, that the gift is doomed. There is a hint of guilt in "pluck," a quiet admission that loving something can mean ending it.
The second stanza abandons memory for statement, and the tense moves to the present: "The past still lingers in the present, / & refuses to leave with the grace / of living things." This sets up a sharp irony. The flowers die gracefully, as living things do, but the past does not. Memory is more stubborn than the flowers, which is exactly the problem.
The ending turns on a repeated phrase. The fragment "to touch, / briefly, / skin" appears in the first stanza, where the skin belongs to no one in particular. When it returns, it has become "to touch, / briefly, / your skin / for the last time." The word "your" and the final phrase make the shift painful. The earlier moment now reads as a goodbye the speaker did not know was one. The gap in the lines before it ("knowing of all the lives that could have been;") hangs on a semicolon, like a thought the speaker cannot finish. Even the definition of regret, "never to forget someone / or something," is vague on purpose. The speaker cannot say clearly whether they mourn a person, a time, or a version of themselves.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains. It offers no consoling lesson, only a precise account of how a good memory can turn bitter, and it builds that account out of a few quiet images: light, branches, flowers, skin. The title, "In the sunlight," makes the point on its own. The place that should feel warmest is where the loss is hardest to avoid.