Seven short lines, and the reader is already being warned. Dave Bonta's "Premonitory" opens like a packing list turned inside out. Instead of what the speaker will carry, we get "Things against my going." The preposition does double duty. Rain and wind are literally against a traveller, but they are also arguments against leaving, omens that say *stay*. The poem never says where the speaker is going, or whether the going is a short trip or something larger. That blank is part of its power, because dread works best when it has no address.
The omens are oddly chosen. Rain and "the wind in the marsh" are what we expect, since weather has long served as a portent. Between them, though, sits "a great deal of paper." Nothing sounds less ominous, yet the phrase unsettles precisely because it is so flat. "A great deal of" is the language of inventories and offices. It makes the speaker sound like a worried, precise mind noting down whatever is piled in the way. The poem doesn't explain the paper, and we can only guess whether it means documents, obligations or something blank. Judging by the placement, the speaker treats it as no less threatening than a storm.
Then comes "Oy." It is one syllable, almost its own sentence, and it is the most human moment in the poem. The list-making composure slips and the speaker sighs. The word is comic and sorrowful at once, and it works as a hinge. The full stop after it acts like an exhale, and afterwards the poem turns away from the weather and looks inward.
The second sentence is longer and gathers itself in a single breath: "I chose the saddest color / for a melancholy mother." We aren't told what is being coloured, whether cloth, a dress, a painting or something seen in a dream. We do see a choice. Unlike the rain and wind, which simply happen to the speaker, this is something he does. The choice is both tender and a little unnerving. Matching a colour to a mother's mood could be care or tact, but it also deepens the gloom. The sound supports this. "Melancholy mother" hums with m's and falls slowly, in a rhythm close to MEL-an-chol-y MOTH-er. The mother arrives from nowhere, and the poem lets her stand as a figure of inherited sadness, or perhaps as the person being left. That reading is an inference, since the text never says.
The last two lines are the most striking: "and had a fear I should see / my house full of swords." The speaker doesn't say "I feared" but "had a fear," as if the fear were an object he possessed, one more item on the list of things against his going. The slightly old-fashioned "I should see" adds a formal, almost chanted tone. And the fear is of *seeing*, which makes it a vision rather than a forecast. The image is carefully built. A house is the most sheltered, domestic space we know, and "full" suggests it is crowded to the doorframe, with no room left for the people who live there. Swords belong to myth and dream rather than to ordinary life, so the fear feels both archaic and unshakeable. The poem ends on a shortened five-syllable line and the hard, hissing cluster of "swords," which stops abruptly like a blade.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no fixed metre. Most lines run to about six or seven syllables, which gives the voice a quiet, steady pulse, like a charm murmured against bad luck. Its sentences vary: a colon and a list, a sudden stop, then one long sentence joined by "and." The shift in grammar mirrors the shift in subject, from outer world to inner choice to imagined horror.
The poem's significance lies in how much it holds in so little space. In seven lines, anxiety travels from weather and paperwork to a mother's sadness and then to violence in the home, which suggests that big fears grow from small, ordinary signs. It also refuses to resolve. The title promises a premonition but never confirms it, so we don't learn whether the swords arrive. We are left standing in the doorway with the speaker, unsure whether to go.