A duel, or something that looks very like one, dissolves in five lines. Dave Bonta's "In the Hague (tanka)" opens on ingredients from a swashbuckling story (ladies, blades, a rapier) and ends with a stroll under the moon. Between the two comes one small act of letting go: "I drop my rapier."
The opening is deliberately slippery. "Two pretty ladies / kiss the two blades with them." What are the blades? Read one way, the women carry swords and kiss them, as if sealing a challenge. Read another way, "blade" is an old word for a dashing young man, and the ladies are simply kissing their companions. The poem never decides, and the doubled "two" keeps both readings alive. Either way, the speaker is outside the pairing, outnumbered or left out. His answer is to put down his weapon. Whether he is conceding a fight, shedding jealousy, or laughing at his own posturing, that gesture is the poem's hinge. In a tanka the third line is traditionally where the poem turns from its upper part to its lower, and here the turn is physical: a hand opens.
After that, everything relaxes. "We walk up and down the town" brings in a "we" with no introduction, which is both odd and lovely. The rival of a moment ago is now part of a group, though the poem leaves open who belongs to it. "Up and down" has a nursery-rhyme lilt, and "down" and "town" make the poem's only true chime, a small internal rhyme in an otherwise unrhymed text. The walking has no destination. It is idling, the opposite of a duel's narrow focus.
The syllable count loosens too. The traditional tanka pattern is 5-7-5-7-7, but Bonta's lines run closer to 5-6-5-7-6, depending on how you say "rapier" and "every." A poem about setting down a rigid weapon doesn't need a rigid count, and the slight shortfall gives the lines a light, clipped quickness.
Look at the diction as well. Almost every word is a single syllable: *kiss*, *blades*, *drop*, *walk*, *door*, *moon*. The few longer words, "pretty," "ladies," "rapier," are the storybook props, a little theatrical and a little worn. "Pretty" in particular is such a casual, unglamorous adjective that the speaker sounds faintly wry, as though he knows the cliché he has stepped into. The plain words do the real work, and the costume words are what he lets fall away.
The ending is the most striking move. "In every door, the moon." There is no verb. The moon doesn't rise or shine; it is simply present, in each doorway. Maybe it shows in glass panes, maybe it hangs at the end of streets framed by doorways, and the poem doesn't say. It works by suggestion. Doors are thresholds, and after the speaker lays down his weapon every threshold seems to open onto something. The moon, an old emblem of romance, quietly repays his surrender. Notice the arithmetic of the poem too: it moves from "two" and "two" to "we" to "every," from a counted, closed pairing to a world that multiplies. The same shape appears in the line "we walk up and down," where the movement is back and forth and nobody is chasing anyone.
The title ties this to a real place, yet the poem gives nothing of the Hague beyond "the town" and its doors, so the scene stays dreamlike, half stage set and half night walk. The poem doesn't explain why the speaker drops the rapier, and that restraint matters. A poem this short could easily turn the moment into a joke or a lecture. Instead it trusts the sequence: confrontation, release, wonder.
What makes it worth reading is how much story fits in so little space. A swordfight that never quite happens, a rivalry that never quite hardens, and an ending that arrives as pure seeing. The poem suggests that the most interesting action in a scene of posturing may be the decision to stop, because only then can you notice the moon in every door.