Five lines, three visions, and not one of them explained: Dave Bonta's "Reluctant Prophet" hands us the raw material of prophecy and then lets the prophet fidget. The speaker sees plenty but never says what it means, and the poem ends not with a message to the world but with a small, almost embarrassed prayer. That gap between seeing and knowing what to do is its central idea.
The opening line, "I see a sea of hands," sounds like a seer's formula, and it is built on a pun. "See" and "sea" are homophones, so the act of looking and the thing looked at blur together. The speaker is not just watching a crowd but being flooded by it. The metaphor also strips the crowd down to hands. We get no faces and no individuals, only a tide of limbs. Raised hands could be pleading, praising, bidding, surrendering or drowning, and the poem refuses to choose. That refusal makes the line unsettling, because whatever the hands want, they want it from the speaker.
The second image is stranger because it is so ordinary: "a wine seller in the wine cellar." A prophet is supposed to see the unexpected, yet this is exactly where you would expect to find a wine seller. The word "wine" appears twice in one line, and the repetition makes the line sag under its own obviousness. "Seller" and "cellar" are again homophones, so the line chimes with itself the way the first did. Wine carries a lot of baggage, from celebration to ritual to drunkenness, and a cellar is a low, hidden place. One way to read the line is as a quiet answer to the sea of hands: here is someone who has what the crowd might want, kept underground. The poem only places the two images side by side and leaves us to link them.
The third vision, "a night made even with the sun," is the one that feels most like prophecy, since it describes the ordinary order of things disturbed. "Made even" is gloriously ambiguous. It might mean night brought up to the brightness of day, or night and day brought into balance, or something settled like a debt. The passive "made" also hides who did the making, which is how visions often work: things happen and no one is named. Whatever is meant, a night that matches the sun is no longer quite a night, and the line leaves a faint sense of categories coming loose.
Then the poem turns, and its title pays off. "What to do?" is plain, spoken language, close to a shrug. Next comes the line break, which does a lot of work: "I pray for" hangs at the end of its line, and we brace for something large, like mercy, rescue or understanding. What arrives is "a change of tune," an everyday idiom borrowed from music. It is funny, and it is also revealing. Perhaps the speaker wants the world to change its tune so that no dire message needs delivering. Perhaps he wants his own tune, the song the visions force him to sing, to be a different one. The idiom holds both readings, and either way he is a prophet hoping not to have to prophesy.
The form supports this deflation. There is no rhyme at the ends of lines, and the sound-play happens inside them, in those paired homophones. The line lengths also trace a shape. Counted by syllable, they run roughly six, nine, eight, six and four, so the poem swells with its visions and then shrinks. The first line is almost a steady iambic hymn line ("I SEE a SEA of HANDS"), but the rhythm loosens as the images pile up and the speaker's confidence drains away. The final line is the shortest, a brief musical phrase that fits the word "tune." Its last word has no rhyming partner, though it faintly echoes the "n" of "sun." A poem about wanting a change of tune ends by offering one, in the form of an abrupt, unresolved stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about the prophet's job. Instead of a confident voice thundering from a mountain, we get someone overwhelmed by a crowd and by strange images, admitting he has no plan. In very few words, Bonta suggests that seeing clearly and knowing what to do about it are separate things, and that the second can leave us praying for something as humble as a different song.