Dave Bonta's "Options" is a short, puzzling poem about how little we can know when we try to choose. It opens with a stubborn kind of defiance: even if there is war, the speaker still has "an if," a small private space of possibility. That "if" feels like the one thing the speaker can hold onto, a bit of freedom inside a situation that seems out of their hands.
The second half pulls back from that confidence. An owl sees well in the dark but isn't built for color, so it can't see green. We, the poem suggests, are limited in a similar way. We can't really see the tomorrow we are busy imagining into being. The word "conceive" is nicely double-edged, since it means both to picture something and to give birth to it.
The mood is quiet, uncertain, and a little wary. There is hope in the "if," but it's tempered by humility about what we can foresee. The poem leaves us standing between possibility and not-knowing.