Most poems about a full moon invite us to admire it. Dave Bonta's "Hunter's Moon" asks instead how anyone is supposed to sleep beneath it. The moon here is an eye, one that "takes / two weeks to open." That compresses the slow swelling from new moon to full into a single heavy-lidded movement. The trouble is its "unwavering gaze." The title adds to the pressure: a hunter's moon implies someone watching and tracking, and the sleeper begins to feel like the thing being watched. That reading is my inference, but the poem's wording supports it.
The central idea is indifference, and the poem builds it through two similes. "Round as an infant" is tender at first, calling up a pale, full face. Then comes "indifferent as a cane toad," which jolts the picture. A cane toad is a squat, warty, poisonous animal, known in places like Australia as an invasive pest. Setting it beside the silver moon of countless love poems drags the moon down to something lumpy and unbothered. The two comparisons share roundness and obliviousness. One creature we want to protect and the other we would rather not touch, so the moon's blankness feels both innocent and faintly repellent.
The syntax carries the idea as well. The poem has no capitals and no full stops, and its second half is one long sentence unspooling over three couplets: the moon is indifferent "to some appearance / of planetary conjunction, / much less any hypothetical / end of life on earth." The word "appearance" is precise. A conjunction is only something that looks like closeness from where we stand, so even the grand event is a trick of perspective. "Much less" then sets up a ladder of scale, from the rare to the final. The vocabulary shifts with it. "Planetary conjunction" and "hypothetical" are long, abstract and Latinate, but the catastrophe arrives in blunt monosyllables: "end of life on earth." The biggest possible subject is delivered flatly, almost as an afterthought, and that flatness is what makes it chilling and a little funny.
The form keeps everything quiet. There are six unrhymed couplets, with short lines of two or three stresses, and the line breaks leave us hanging on small words. "To some appearance" and "any hypothetical" both end a line before their nouns arrive, so the reader waits just as the sleepless speaker does. Each gap between couplets works like a blink, which is exactly what this eye never does. The sounds are mostly soft and hushed ("sleep," "unwavering gaze," "round," "infant"), with the harder consonants of "cane toad" breaking in.
The last couplet turns the poem. "Where the other eye / now dreams storms" suggests the moon has two eyes, one open and one asleep. It is hard to say exactly what the closed eye stands for. It could be the unseen far side, or the moon pictured as an animal resting with half its attention. The word "now" brings us suddenly into the present, and "dreams storms," two stresses with nothing between them, gives the moon an inner life after all. The calm, staring face has turbulence behind it. Judging by the imagery, this mirrors the human watcher, whose surface stillness at night may hide the same kind of weather. The moon's indifference may not be as complete as it seemed, or the speaker may be reading their own restlessness into it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in twelve short lines. It sets a very small human problem, being unable to sleep, against the largest imaginable one, the end of life on earth, and lets the moon's stare flatten the difference between them. Whether that indifference is frightening or consoling is left open. If the universe will not notice our endings, it will not notice our worries either. By finishing on a dream, with no answer to its own question, the poem leaves us in the same position as its speaker, awake under a light that does not look away.