Fifteen words, one sentence, and a title that doubles as a pun on the whole enterprise. Dave Bonta's "Concentration" opens with an order, "Think:", but instead of telling us what to think, it tells us what to allow. Everything after the colon hangs on the verb "let", and the poem's central idea is that real concentration is less a clenching than a surrender. Blood becomes ink, the evening takes over, and the house is sung to sleep.
Take the first image. "Let blood / go to ink" borrows the old phrase for bloodletting, the practice of opening a vein to relieve a patient. Here the opened vein is a pen. Writing is imagined as something drawn out of the body, red turning to black, and the title quietly picks up its chemical sense: a liquid made denser and more potent. The line suggests cost, since the writer is giving something up. But the verb is "go", not "pour" or "wring". The blood is released, not forced.
The next lines are where the grammar gets slippery. Read straight through, "ivy in / the evening sing / our house to bed" has the ivy doing the singing, a plant personified as a lullaby-singer. (Judging by the imagery, we might hear leaves rustling at dusk, though the poem never says so.) But the line break after "in" opens a second reading: *let ivy in*, and then *let the evening sing our house to bed*. Now the break works like a doorway, and "in" becomes an invitation, with the outdoors creeping into the room and into the poem. Neither reading cancels the other. In both, the opening command dissolves into a string of permissions, and the single "let" seems to spread over everything that follows, the way ivy spreads over a wall.
Sound does quiet work as well. There is no end rhyme, but short *i* sounds run through the poem like a thread: think, ink, ivy, in, in, evening, sing. "Think" and "ink" are nearly the same syllable with a different start, so the poem makes thought and ink share a sound just as the first lines make them share a process. The thread ends on "sing", which brings back the same -ing sound as "think" and turns the opening effort into song. The rhythm supports this. The first line is all monosyllables, "Think: let blood", and the colon makes the reader pause before the instruction arrives. Three of the four lines run on, splitting verb from object ("go / to ink", "sing / our house"), so the poem tips forward and nothing stops it until the full stop after "bed", a plain, soft thud like a door being closed.
What gives the poem its charge is the collision of registers. Bloodletting is clinical and a little frightening, while a lullaby is tender. The word "our" matters here. It makes the house shared and domestic, and the house is treated like a child being tucked in, with the evening as the parent. The scale is reversed: something as large and solid as a house is hushed like a small creature. There is also a visual rhyme in the darkening itself. Ink is black, and evening is the day's blackening, so as the writer's blood goes to ink, the light goes out of the house. Writing is not set apart as a heroic, solitary ordeal. It happens inside the same slow ebbing that puts a household to sleep.
That is why the poem is worth reading closely despite its size. It practises what its title names, since there is hardly a word to spare, and it argues for a particular idea of attention. We usually picture concentration as narrowing, a fist closing around a problem. The poem pictures it as hospitality: let the blood go, let the ivy in, let the evening do its work. A reader might come away thinking that the deepest focus comes when we stop gripping and let the thinking turn into something else, ink or song.