Eight short lines, and the sun has already been struck from the sky. "Eclipsed" begins with two flat equations, "The Lord, a lamb; / the sun, nothing," and the missing verbs are the first thing to notice. Bonta never writes "is" or "becomes." The commas do the work, so the Lord is reduced to a lamb and the sun to nothing without anyone announcing it. The effect is of a demotion carried out quietly, as plain fact.
The Lord as a lamb echoes the old image of the Lamb of God, a figure of gentleness and sacrifice. Here, though, the lamb sits beside a vanished sun, and the pairing suggests that power has been swapped for vulnerability, or that the great light that once stood for divine authority has gone out. The title makes the literal scene clear: this is an eclipse, the sun blotted out. But the poem is less interested in describing the event than in what it does to language. Once the sun is "nothing," the poem keeps reaching for something to fill the gap.
The dash after "nothing" is the hinge. Everything after it is a run of substitutes, each introduced with a kind of shrug, and the final "or" admits that none of them settles the matter. The sun is "a sheep's head / with a war bark," a "public hatch," "sad money," "a hand with / a high fever." These read like the guesses of someone staring at a black disc, trying on names. Several are round or hole-like: a head, a hatch, a coin. That gives the eclipse a visual logic, a dark circle that could be a severed head, an opening in a deck, or a spent coin.
The details are strange in ways that reward slow reading. A sheep's head is a gentle animal reduced to a part, and it echoes the lamb of line one. Yet it comes with a "war bark," and sheep do not bark. The phrase sets the soft and the aggressive in one creature, as if the lamb had a violent double. "Public hatch" can suggest a ship's opening, or something being hatched, and "public" adds the sense of a crowd looking up at the same moment. That is my inference from the word, but an eclipse is one of the few things a whole town watches together. "Sad money" gives a coin an emotion, so the sun, once a source of wealth and warmth, becomes tarnished and devalued.
The last image shifts register. A coin or a hatch is an object, but "a hand with / a high fever" is a body, and a sick one. The line break after "with" leaves the preposition hanging, so the reader waits a beat for what the hand carries. What arrives is heat and illness. After so much cold nothingness, the poem ends on something that burns. The sun is dark, yet it is still imagined as hot, reaching and unwell.
Sound ties the fragments together even without rhyme. The short "u" runs through "sun," "nothing," "public" and "money," quietly linking the sun to the images that replace it. The "h" sounds in "head," "hatch," "hand" and "high" give the second half a breathy, feverish pulse. The lines are clipped, mostly two to four syllables, with the stress falling hard on nouns, so the poem moves in jolts rather than a smooth flow. Semicolon and dash do the heavy lifting, and the only full stop waits at the very end.
What makes "Eclipsed" worth reading is how much it asks the reader to do. It gives no explanation and no consoling frame, only a series of pictures that almost fit. Like a riddle, it leaves the answer to you. Its larger suggestion is that when a central symbol of light, authority or meaning goes dark, we do not fall silent. We start naming the gap, and the names keep changing because none of them is quite right.