Monks are supposed to give things up, yet the speaker of Barbara Moraff's "Poem" sounds almost surprised at what has come back to them. Over a few months they have become "monastic / content," living a stripped-down life where "only the weather" is left to push against. The poem ends with a small act of invention: the speaker makes bells out of that weather and hangs them "over your side of the bed." Its central idea is that solitude and absence can be embraced and turned into something made, even music. But the last line keeps a missing person in view, so the contentment never becomes simple.
The opening is oddly bare. "I have" is missing, so "during the past few months become monastic" arrives like a note jotted down mid-thought. The line break after "monastic" leaves "content" ambiguous. It might be a second adjective (monastic, and content) or a noun (a monastic content, a way of being filled). The poem then stops with its only full stop, and "this" is left dangling at the end of the line, as if the speaker is looking for the right word. The word they choose is "unseemly," which is surprising. Contentment is the proper reward of a monastic life, so what is improper about it? The poem suggests, though never says, that being happy alone feels faintly scandalous, as if the speaker ought to be pining instead.
The next lines explain the feeling away, and the explanation sounds a little too quick. "Is im sure a function / of space" borrows the cool vocabulary of mathematics, and the missing apostrophe in "im" makes the assurance sound breezy and offhand. Then "of space" gets a line to itself, with blank paper on either side. The poem is demonstrating the thing it names. "Phase" and "space" also nearly rhyme, the only sound-echo of that kind in the poem, so the two words seem to explain each other. "Contend" is a fighting word, and the speaker's only opponent is "the weather." Judging by the diction, the speaker's earlier life may have involved harder contests than this one, but the text leaves that unspoken.
The last three lines are where the poem turns. "Embrace" is a word for bodies, and here it is given to a phase of life. The ampersands in "& i embrace it & hang the bells" make the speed of the line almost breathless, with one action tumbling into the next. Then the poem slows into its strangest image. Bells are made "of its wind," though wind has no substance to make anything from. It only moves things and makes them sound. The speaker is shaping something out of an element that can't be held, and "weather" in line six has sharpened into the more specific "wind" in line nine. Both words begin with the same sound, so the connection is quiet but audible.
Only at the very end does "you" appear, in the final line, "over your side of the bed." Until then the poem has been all "i" and "it," and the withheld "you" makes the reader feel the absence in the same way the speaker does. A bell hung above a bed will only ring if air moves through the room, so the image holds both silence and hope. It could be a tender gesture toward someone who is gone, a memorial, or a gentle reproach, and the poem refuses to choose among them. It never says who "you" is or where they have gone.
Formally, this is free verse with no meter and no rhyme scheme beyond that one near-echo. The lines are short, often two to five words, and heavy with enjambment, so phrases like "to contend with" read like small breaths or hesitations. The lowercase and the near-total lack of punctuation give the poem a private, unguarded sound, like something written in a notebook and never meant for display. With no closing full stop, it ends open, like the wind it describes.
The poem is worth reading because it avoids two familiar stories, the lament for the lost lover and the triumph of independence. In ten lines it sets contentment beside a faint ache and lets them both stand. The domestic scale helps. The poem never speaks of grief directly. It only says where the bells are hung.