Four lines, one sentence, and an empire's picture of itself turned inside out. Dave Bonta's "Civilizing mission" gives the floor to a traveler bound for the Indies, and the odd thing about him is how fast he demotes himself. He opens with the brisk confidence of a man on an errand ("I go to the Indies / on business with Christ") and finishes by calling himself "an ape / not knowing the dirt." The poem is about that drop, and about who deserves the word "civilizing" in its title.
That title is a phrase borrowed from the language of conquest, and the poem undercuts it almost at once. The key word in the second line is "business." It can mean a religious errand, as in "I have business with you," or it can mean trade, and the speaker never says which. The preposition makes it stranger. He goes "on business *with* Christ," as if Christ were a partner in the firm rather than a master to be served. Sacred purpose and commercial interest are pressed into five syllables, and nobody in the poem notices the join. The line break adds another possible reading. "Christ / in the ship" can sound like a passenger, or even freight, carried across the water along with everything else. That is one possible reading, but the grammar allows it.
The third line is where the poem turns, and it turns on a missing verb. "And I an ape" leaves out "am," so the sentence stumbles into its confession. The clipped phrasing sounds like a ledger entry, or like someone speaking in a language he has only half learned. The word "ape" does two jobs. It reverses the old colonial habit of calling other peoples animals, since here the voyager applies the insult to himself. It also works as a verb: to ape is to imitate. The civilizer may only be copying the words of faith and conquest without understanding them, which makes him a mimic rather than a master.
The last line, "not knowing the dirt," is the most open. Dirt can be soil, the actual ground he is about to claim, and then he is ignorant of the very place he means to improve. Dirt can also be filth, the thing civilization claims to wash away, and then he cannot even see the grime in his own enterprise. The poem never chooses between these readings, and both sting. The participle "knowing" also keeps the sentence from closing. There is no full stop after "dirt," so the ignorance feels ongoing, like a voyage still under way.
The sound of the poem builds the same descent. The short *i* repeats through the opening lines (Indies, business, Christ, ship, in), a tight, self-satisfied chatter. Then the vowels open and drop into "ape" and the dull thud of "dirt." There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run roughly six, five, seven and five syllables, and the longest one carries the admission, as if the speaker needs extra room to say something so unflattering. The diction is almost entirely plain and monosyllabic. Apart from the one stark metaphor, there is no ornament for the speaker to hide behind. The comma after "ship" is the only mark of punctuation inside the sentence, and it works as a hinge between the outward declaration and the inward verdict.
The poem's significance lies in what it refuses to do. It names no villain, shows no violence and offers no speech of outrage. It lets a single voice undermine itself in four short lines. Whether that voice is sincerely humbled or the poem is quietly mocking him is left to the reader, and the present tense of "I go" keeps the question current rather than historical. A mission that arrives certain of its own civilization, and ignorant of the ground it stands on, is hard to forget once it has been called an ape.