Most prayers ask for comfort. Dave Bonta's "Noon Prayer" asks to have things done to the speaker's mind. The first line, "Noon, do things to my mind," turns the hour into someone who can be addressed directly. The command is blunt and oddly vague. The speaker doesn't say what should be done, only that something should happen. The poem as a whole is a petition made from a dark place, begging the brightest hour of the day to push back against what the night brings.
The second line, "Fit my chamber," is the most puzzling, and its strangeness is the point. A chamber can be a room, and in a poem about the mind it suggests the skull, a closed space with the speaker shut inside. "Fit" asks noon to suit the room, to be the right size for it, as if light were a key or a part that must match. Another reading comes to mind, since a chamber is also where a bullet sits in a gun. The poem never says so, but the verb "fit" gives that reading some force, and it adds a faint menace to the prayer. Noon is asked to be gentle and also exact.
Night arrives in the second couplet "with coke and dismay, / without a beginning." Bonta doesn't say what "coke" is, and the ambiguity is useful. It could be a drug, a soft drink, or the fuel baked from coal. The third reading fits the industrial, grimy feeling the poem builds, and the first suggests a restless, wired kind of dismay. Whichever the reader picks, the word is hard and slightly ugly beside the abstract "dismay." "Without a beginning" is equally open. It may describe night, which never seems to start but is simply there, or the dismay, which has no origin the speaker can name. Noon is a sharp point in the day. Night, in this picture, is a smear.
The last couplet turns on a pun: "so reflect upon me / though I don a lead hat." To reflect is to throw light back, as a mirror does, and also to think carefully about someone. Noon is asked to do both, to shine on the speaker and to give the speaker some thought. The "lead hat" is a good comic and sad image. Lead blocks light and rays, so the speaker is armoured against the very thing being begged for. It is also heavy, and lead has long stood for dullness and gloom. Judging by the imagery, the speaker wants rescue and keeps resisting it, wearing a weight that no light can get through. The word "though" admits the contradiction openly, which makes the prayer feel honest.
The construction is spare. There are three couplets and six short lines, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Lines like "Fit my chamber" fall into a few hard stresses, which gives the voice a clipped, urgent sound. Enjambment and the dangling comma after "beginning" push the reader into "so," which turns the second couplet into a reason for the third. The sounds help too. "Noon," "mind," "night" and "beginning" share an insistent n, tying the two times of day together even as the poem sets them against each other. The hard c of "comes" and "coke" gives night a rough edge, while the soft vowels of "reflect" and "lead" make the last couplet sag, as though the hat were already on.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it compresses. In six lines it keeps the shape of a prayer, with an invocation, a request and a reason, but fills it with modern, uncomfortable material and a joke that doesn't undercut the fear. The speaker is neither pious nor ironic. They are asking for help while holding it off, and that contradiction is why the poem lingers.