Four short lines, and the first two try to define war and desire, subjects that usually take whole books. Dave Bonta's "War correspondent" does it in a handful of syllables: "War is a dizziness, / desire is business." The poem is about what happens to a person whose job is to report clearly on something that makes clear sight impossible. Its central idea is that the writer's tools, ink and language, are unreliable in the face of war, and that the writer knows it.
Take the first definition. The poem could have chosen "horror" or "violence", but it picks "dizziness", a bodily word. Dizziness is the loss of your footing, the world tilting while you stand in it. Seen this way, war is not a story with sides and causes laid out in order but a disorientation, and that is awkward for someone whose profession is to give a steady account. The word also carries a second shade, since dizziness can mean giddiness, even intoxication. I read the word as holding both nausea and a strange thrill, though the poem doesn't spell this out.
The second line is blunter. "Desire is business" drops the article that softened the first line, so the statement feels flat, like a price on a ticket. "Business" can mean commerce, trade or simply being busy. The poem never says whose desire it means. It could be the appetite that drives conflicts, the hunger of a correspondent for a story, or the public's appetite for news. That open question is where the line gets its force. Wanting, whoever does it, has become a transaction.
The sound of the poem makes the same argument. "Dizziness" and "business" form an off-rhyme, matched by their shared ending in "-ness", a suffix that turns conditions into abstract states. By rhyming them, the poem makes war and desire sound related, as though the rhyme itself were the claim. The sharp, thin "i" vowel also runs through the whole text: dizziness, business, ink, will, till. It is a narrow sound, which suits a poem about things wearing thin. The repeated "is" in "War is" and "desire is" adds a faint hiss that carries into the endings of both rhyme words.
Then the poem changes gear. The tidy rhymed definitions give way to the first person and the future tense: "My ink will be water / till night." The rhyme is gone, since "water" and "night" do not echo each other, and a sentence spills over a line break. The form seems to lose its balance, just as the opening line said war would make a person do. The last line is only two syllables long, the shortest of the four, and it arrives like a deadline or a door closing.
The central image is the ink that has become water. The two are nearly opposites, because ink stains and water washes away. Ink that is water leaves no lasting mark, so the correspondent's writing may be diluted, forgotten by morning, or unable to testify to what happened. Water has other associations too, such as tears, but the poem doesn't push us there, and I would treat that as a possible reading, not a certainty.
"Till night" is the most interesting phrase. It sets a limit, since the ink is watery only for a while. Night is also ink-coloured, so perhaps the writing regains its darkness and weight once day is over. Perhaps the day's reporting is too hurried to hold anything, and only after dark, when the dizziness has settled, can the real words come. The poem gives no punctuation at the end and does not choose between these readings, so it stops on "night" with the question still open.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty. It shows no battlefield and no bodies, and the speaker makes no claim to authority. Instead it looks at the instrument of witness and admits that it is unsteady. In a few words it gives a quiet account of how difficult it is to write truthfully about war, and it leaves the reader to decide what comes after nightfall.