"What news?" is one of the oldest greetings there is, a way of opening a conversation and expecting a few items of gossip or alarm in return. Dave Bonta's six-line poem takes that question as its title and then, in the space of a breath, declines to play along. The speaker has no news to give and no wish to collect any. What he offers instead is a short list of what he does enjoy: "Morning air pleases me, / and water at night."
The central idea is that contentment can come from stepping back. The poem never argues for this. It simply reports a state of mind. The speaker is "out of dirt and trouble," and the phrase works in two ways. He may be free of dirt and trouble, or he may have run out of them, like a shopkeeper whose stock is gone. "Dirt" is also a word for scandal, so it quietly names what news so often consists of. Dirt and trouble are the daily goods of the headlines, and this speaker has lost his supply.
The reason is given in the longest and slowest line: "now that I am become negligent." The grammar is old-fashioned. "I am become" is an older way of forming the perfect tense, and it gives the line a faint, almost scriptural gravity. It also stretches the line out, as if the speaker were sinking into his indifference by degrees. The word "negligent" is the poem's quiet joke. Neglect is normally a fault, something we are scolded for, and here it is a achievement, something arrived at. Then comes the stiff, nearly bureaucratic phrase "as to matters of news." Calling news "matters" makes it sound like paperwork, something one might happily leave unattended.
The two opening pleasures are carefully chosen. Air and water are among the most basic things a body needs, and neither is ever reported on. They also bracket the day: morning at one end, night at the other. The hours between, when most news happens, are left out. That is an inference, but the poem's shape invites it. The speaker's day is framed by the elemental, and the busy middle is allowed to fall away. There is a pleasing irony here too. By listing what pleases him, the speaker has given us news after all, just of a different kind from what was asked for.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre. It is free verse, but it is not shapeless. The first two lines are balanced, six syllables and then five, and they sound settled and calm. The lines then lengthen, with seven syllables for the third and eight for the fourth, as the speaker explains himself. The fifth line settles back to six. The last line breaks the pattern completely: "Ask another." These two words are short, blunt and final. They are polite but firm, like a door being shut gently. They can also be read in two ways, as "ask someone else" or as "ask me a different question." Both readings suit a speaker who has no interest in being the town's source of information.
The sound of the poem supports its mood. Soft, humming consonants run through it: "morning," "me," "negligent," "news," "matters." Even the one rough word, "dirt," is followed quickly by the open vowels of "trouble" and "become," which echo each other. Nothing in the poem clatters or hurries, which is exactly the opposite of how the news usually reaches us.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets done with so little. It is a single reply, a few plain words long, and yet it carries a whole attitude toward the way we live now, always being told things and always being invited to worry. The poem does not scold anyone for following the news. It simply shows one person who has found that air and water are enough, and who is willing to say so in a voice too relaxed to sound smug. The final instruction to ask another leaves the question open for the reader. After reading it, we might wonder how many of our own answers to "What news?" are really just dirt and trouble, passed along out of habit.