Ask for a definition of a king and you would expect a throne, a crown, a crowd of subjects. Dave Bonta's "What a king is" gives you none of these. It starts like a riddle and ends in a lit-up street, and on the way the king turns out to be less a person than a trick of language.
The first three sentences set up the puzzle. "Among other things very fine, which thing is a king?" The question has a stiff, slightly old-fashioned politeness, as if it came out of a catechism or a very formal quiz. The answer is a tautology: "The king is a king." That is no answer at all, and the poem knows it. It rescues the line by adding "a word and net." A word is all the circular definition has given us, and a net is what words become when we use them to catch things. Calling someone a king throws a net over them. The next sentence tightens the image: the king is "a cover for the king, girt with words." The king is a covering over the king, so there may be nothing underneath. "Girt" is an archaic word for belted or encircled, and it makes the words feel like a ceremonial sash or a restraint, grandeur and confinement at once. The sentence also folds back on itself, with the king inside the king, which echoes the earlier tautology.
The second half drops the circling and offers three quick pictures, each beginning with the same flat phrase, "The king is." The repetition works like a spell, or like someone trying answer after answer and hoping one will stick. They are all deflations. "A lord changed for an old hat" suggests a swap in which grandeur goes in and something worn comes out. "Old hat" is also an idiom for what is stale and out of date, so the king's loss of power is built into the phrase. "A plain moth, a chance tenant" shrinks him further. A moth is drab and fragile, and it is drawn to light, which could be a quiet comment on how power draws people and how people are drawn to it. "Chance tenant" makes the king temporary and accidental, someone renting a space and not owning it. That fits the poem's suspicion that the role is a cover and nobody's natural possession.
The last line, "The king is a familiar street at night," changes the mood. After the dry wit and the small creatures, we get something quiet and atmospheric. A street you know well looks different in the dark, so it is known and strange at the same moment. It is also the only image that is not a person, a creature or an object but a whole place, and it is somewhere you walk through, not something you look up at. If kingship is anywhere, the poem suggests, it is in how an ordinary world feels when seen in a certain light. That reading is my own inference, but the ending certainly leaves us with atmosphere in place of authority.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, and it sits in two short prose-like paragraphs of three sentences each. That symmetry gives it a tidy, almost logical shape, which is a nice irony for a text that undermines logic. The rhythm comes from short, declarative sentences and mostly one- and two-syllable words, so the lines move like a series of flat statements. Small sound echoes, such as "word and net," "plain moth" and "chance tenant," give the plainness some music without making it sound decorative.
The poem is worth reading because it shows, in barely fifty words, how a title can work like a costume. It does not argue that kings are foolish. It lets the definition fall apart until what remains is a word, a net, a moth and a street. For a student, it is a good example of how a poem can make a big idea about power and naming feel light, funny and slightly eerie.