Possession is usually a matter of things: a house, a weapon, a loaf of bread. In Dave Bonta's "Options", what the speaker claims to own is a conjunction. The poem is six lines long, and it makes a case for how little a person may need in order to go on hoping.
It opens with a concession: "war though it be". The word order is inverted and slightly archaic, the way someone talks when they are bracing themselves. The "it" is never defined. The poem gives no date or setting, so the safest reading is that the speaker grants the worst first, whatever "it" is, and only then says what they hold: "I have myself an if." That phrase is deliberately slippery. "Myself" can mean "for myself" (I keep an if for my own use), or it can nudge toward "I am an if," as if the speaker's whole identity were conditional. Either way, the title explains the choice. An "if" is the smallest unit of possibility, the grammatical form of an option. And the speaker has just one.
The second couplet turns abruptly, with no connecting word, to the poem's only concrete image: "an owl is not fit / to see green". An owl belongs to the dark, so it is built for night and for seeing in a different way. "Fit" does double duty, meaning both "suited" and "proper." The line break leaves "to see green" on its own, the shortest line in the poem, and green, the colour of growth, stands out against the bare, colourless language around it. A creature of darkness cannot make out the very thing that signals life. The poem states this flatly, as fact, and lets us supply the analogy.
The analogy arrives in the final couplet: "or we to see which / tomorrow we conceive". The grammar is compressed, and we have to fill in the missing words ourselves: we, too, are not fit to see. The line ends on "which," a word that hangs open, and what follows is the puzzle. We are the ones conceiving tomorrow, yet we cannot see which tomorrow it is. "Conceive" carries two meanings, to imagine and to bring into being, as in a pregnancy. Our futures are imagined and also made, but we are no better placed to recognise them than the owl is to see green.
The poem's sound repays attention too. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines run from three to six syllables. Yet one vowel threads through it: "be," "see," "green," "we," "see," "conceive." That long *e* links the opening to the close, so the poem moves from "be" to "conceive," from simply existing in a war to imagining beyond it. The short, clipped *i* of "if" and "fit" gives the smaller words a tight, tentative feel. Lines also tend to end on weak, unfinished words ("be," "if," "which") rather than on nouns, so the poem keeps leaning forward without landing. The lack of punctuation and the lowercase lines, with only "I" capitalised, let the thought drift from one clause to the next the way it might in someone's head.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about hope. It doesn't promise that tomorrow will be green, and it doesn't claim the speaker can see clearly. The owl suggests that even a good future might go unrecognised by eyes shaped by the dark. The speaker's resource is modest, a conditional rather than a belief. Yet the poem treats that "if" as something owned, even valued, and "options" is a word that implies choice. In six short lines it suggests that when certainty is unavailable, imagination is still a way of acting. It also leaves a pointed question for the reader: what is your own "if," and would you know green when you saw it?