Jason Ridpath's "Empty Wishing" never describes a funeral or a deathbed. Its final image is a pile of dishes. That choice shows where the poem's attention lies: not on the moment of loss, but on the unglamorous aftermath, when a speaker is left alone with everything they didn't do. The poem is about regret, and more precisely about how regret makes us bargain with a past that cannot be changed. Its central idea arrives in the last line, where the wishing turns out to be "empty" in two senses. It is useless as a remedy, and it may also be a way of avoiding the harder feeling it seems to express.
The construction is bare. There is no rhyme scheme to speak of and no regular metre, and each sentence sits alone as its own stanza, surrounded by white space. That isolation feels deliberate. Each line reads like a separate thought surfacing, which is how grief tends to arrive. The first four lines all begin "I wish," a repetition that builds a rhythm of longing, and then the pattern breaks with the flat, final "Now I can never have them again." The language throughout is plain and conversational ("I wish I got to hold you again"). It sounds like someone thinking aloud rather than composing verse, which makes it feel unrehearsed and honest.
The most inventive phrasing comes in the fourth wish: "those moments that were now, but now, they are then." Within a single clause the present slips into the past, and the repeated "now" changes meaning halfway through. First it is the lived moment, then the grieving present that looks back on it. As the poem is printed, the line also breaks on the word "and," leaving it dangling before "they never seem to last" arrives, so the layout mimics time slipping away. "Last" comes back later in "your last breath," where it shifts from "endure" to "final." The two words are linked by sound as well. "Passed" ends one line and "last" ends the next, the nearest thing the poem has to a rhyme, and it chimes on death and time.
The opening line sets a quiet trap. To be "wise in the moments that matter" is the one thing nobody can arrange in advance, because moments rarely announce their importance until afterward. "I wasn't to know it would be your last breath" is the speaker's defence, the closest thing to consolation, yet it sits right beside the missed kiss and the lost chance to hold the person. Reason and guilt are pulling against each other.
Then comes the turn into the everyday: "I'm empty wishing when I should be cleaning the dishes instead." The drop from the grand to the domestic is deliberately deflating, and the phrase "should be" carries a faint self-reproach, as though grieving were a way of neglecting life's small duties. There is a sound game here too: "wishing" and "dishes" share their "-ish" core, as if the wishes have been swept in among the chores. The final line reveals the poem's real subject: "Empty wishing, to distract from my regret." Only here does the word "regret" appear, after the poem has circled it for seven lines. Imagining a different kiss is easier than facing what actually happened. By repeating the title phrase, the ending also suggests that the poem itself may be a form of the same distraction.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to dress grief up. It offers no heavenly comfort and no tidy lesson, only a mind caught between fantasy and fact while ordinary life waits to be done. For students it shows how much can be carried by short lines, repetition and a single well-placed everyday image, and it leaves a lasting thought about how we spend the moments that are still "now."