Six short lines, and almost nothing is explained. Someone has come through something unharmed, yet the poem refuses to settle into relief. Instead it tracks a build-up of pressure, from a quiet opening to a last line that goes off like a spark. The poem comes with no title, only three asterisks, the sign usually used for a break in a text. That makes it feel as if we have walked in halfway through a story, so the evidence has to come from the words themselves.
The opening is oddly matter-of-fact. "Unscathed, you kept / your new electronics." The line break after "kept" makes the verb a small act of gripping or holding on. The detail is strange: what survives is not a memory or a relationship but gadgetry, and "new" gives it a shiny, untouched look. The poem doesn't say what the danger was, and judging by the imagery, that vagueness is deliberate. The surface is intact, the equipment works, and the word "Unscathed" begins to sound slightly too confident.
Then the tone shifts. "The witch in the belly / rose to the breast." Against the cool modernity of electronics, the poem sets a figure from folklore, and sets it inside the body. A witch is an old and ambiguous figure, feared and powerful at once, and putting her in the belly makes her something instinctive, a gut feeling or a hunger or a fury that has been sleeping. When she "rose to the breast," the movement can be read as a feeling climbing from the gut to the heart, the way fear or anger or desire physically travels upward. The verb is worth noticing. "Rose" is soft and unhurried, like bread or a sunrise, which makes the uncanny sound almost natural. Nothing is violent yet.
The violence comes in the final two lines, which have no verb at all. "Under the hammer, a firecracker, / urgent You." The phrase "under the hammer" has two meanings that both fit. It is what we say about something being auctioned, handed over to the highest bidder, and it is also the hammer of a gun or the striking tool that sets off an explosive. So the "you" is either about to be sold or about to go off, and perhaps both. A firecracker is a good choice of image because it is small, cheap and festive but also dangerous, a lot of noise packed into a tiny space.
The last two words matter most. "You" now has a capital letter, whereas in the first line it was a lowercase pronoun. A reader can take that as a promotion, as if the person addressed has become a name, a presence, or something close to a prayer or a command. Notice too how the poem opens on "Unscathed, you" and closes on "urgent You," with a shared "u" sound running through "Under" in between. The poem is a loop that begins with a calm survivor and ends with the same person charged up and impossible to ignore.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the line lengths do real work. Counting syllables roughly, the lines run four, six, six, four, then about nine or ten, then three. The short lines act like a fuse, the long fifth line gathers pressure, and "urgent You" is the tiny snap at the end. The sounds shift along with the lengths: the soft, rounded "witch," "belly" and "rose" give way to the hard stops of "hammer," "firecracker" and "urgent."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without telling us anything. It sets the technological next to the ancient, the protected surface next to the unruly body, and it implies that surviving something is not the same as being at peace. The reader is left to decide what the danger was, what the witch stands for, and who "You" really is. A good short poem can leave a space like that and make the reader feel the charge in it.