A letter arrives, but before we learn what it says we have to meet the people who deliver it. In Dave Bonta's "Above and Beyond," the messengers are "my cousin snow and my father rain." Weather has been taken into the family, given a place at the table and a surname. The phrasing may remind a reader of the old postal creed that neither snow nor rain will stop the courier, so the poem seems to turn that saying inside out: snow and rain are no longer obstacles to the mail but the mail carriers themselves. The sender is "my brother the angel," and the poem hands over his message without comment, as if nothing about the arrangement were strange.
That deadpan tone is the poem's main trick. The pattern of a relative followed by a bare noun repeats three times, "cousin snow," "father rain," "brother the angel," and each time the grammar treats the second word as a plain fact about the first. The last of these also has a faintly comic ring, since "my brother the…" is the sort of phrase a family uses to boast or tease. Yet the poem keeps a straight face. The second line, "come with a letter from," ends on a preposition and leaves us hanging for a moment before the sender is named. The colon at the end of line three then works as a hinge. Everything before it is delivery, and everything after it is the message.
The message is three commands: "Buy others a home, look after workmen, / trouble the parliament." Their scale widens as they go. A home is private and domestic, and looking after workmen is a matter of labor and community. Parliament is the nation's lawmaking machinery. The first two verbs are gentle ("buy," "look after"), and the third is not. To "trouble" a parliament is to disturb it, to be a nuisance to power. The word is unexpected, and it makes the angel's advice sound less like a sermon and more like a program of quiet agitation. Readers who know the Bible may also hear a faint echo of angels who "trouble" water, though that is an inference from the word, not something the poem states. Either way, the instruction to help others and then to make trouble for the powerful gives the poem its edge.
The poem has no end rhyme and no regular meter, and it reads like plain speech. Its music is quieter. The first line has a loose, walking rhythm, four main stresses in "my COUSin SNOW and my FAther RAIN," and the lines then shorten and tighten as the commands begin. "Rain" and "angel" share the same long vowel, which links the father to the brother across the stanza. "Snow" and "home" share another, so the weather and the thing the weather ought to shelter us from are joined by sound. In the last two lines the consonants "m" and "n" recur in "home," "workmen" and "parliament," a low hum that carries the commands along. The poem ends on the longest word it contains, "parliament," which is also the most institutional. The finish lands with a thud, as if the letter had been slapped down on a desk.
The title adds a second layer. "Above and beyond" is the phrase for going further than duty requires, and it describes the angel's demands, which stretch past ordinary charity into politics. It also works as a map. Snow and rain come from above, and the angel writes from somewhere beyond. Judging by the imagery, the poem may be imagining a family that has passed out of ordinary life into sky and weather, though it never says so, and the reading stays open. What the poem does make clear is that the dead, or the heavenly, or the simply faraway, can still hand down obligations.
The poem is significant for how much it packs into five lines. It joins nature, family, the supernatural and civic life in one gesture, and it never explains the joining. The reader is left to decide whether the angel is a joke, a conscience, or a memory, and what it would mean to obey him. Because the message is not argued for, it carries the force of a family inheritance, something received rather than chosen.