Shire's poem is written in a particularly modern form of free verse. It has no meter, capitalization, or punctuation. The lines are irregular and highly variable in length, while the breaks seem largely determined by shifts in subject matter. This formal openness serves the content of the poem well, as it highlights its emotional content, making it feel like an overheard conversation or privately shared words of comfort. While this style may appear very unfamiliar, most modern poetry is written in free verse. Examining how some other contemporary poets use free verse provides some insight into Shire's formal choices.
In his poem, "Iowa City: Early April," Robert Hass uses free verse to loosely convey impressions of birdsong:
And male cardinals whistling back and forth—sireeep, sreeep, sreeep—
Sets of three sweet full notes, weaving into and out of each other like the triplet rhymes in medieval poetry,
And the higher, purer notes of the tufted titmice among them,
High in the trees where they were catching what they could of the early sun.
Here, the speaker uses a lack of formal constraint to weave in various sensory details, painting a sonic picture of the interaction between the cardinals and tufted titmice in the trees. Without the necessity of a rhyme scheme or meter, Hass is better able to focus on these small moments and construct the stanza around impressions and mood. Each line closes in on an individual moment, minutely depicting both birds, their respective songs, and their placement in the trees overhead. Hass's use of free verse demonstrates what organizing principles he uses in place of verse and meter.
Another example of the use of free verse is Morgan Parker's "Parker’s Mood by Charlie Parker":
I am only as lonely
as anybody else, I say
at lunch downtown, examining
my worth. It isn’t
summertime. At the end,
Parker's formal decisions in this poem reflect her focus on directness. Combined with its use of enjambment, the poem's use of free verse gives it a conversational quality, as if the speaker is freely sharing her feelings ("I am only as lonely / as anyone else") with the reader. Without the strictures of meter and rhyme, Parker constructs the poem with an emphasis on the conversational texture of the speaker's voice. Shire, like Hass and Parker, selected this more open structure in order to place importance on a direct communication of mood and emotion.
