A man with feathers sets out to find a kite and never gets there. That is the whole plot of Dave Bonta's "Shortcut", and it is over in six lines. The poem's central idea is that joy is not something you arrive at by questing. It happens to you on the way, or in place of the way, and it is not always welcome even when it comes.
The opening is built on a pun. A "kite" can be a bird of prey or a paper toy on a string, and the poem never says which one the man is after. The feathers sit oddly beside either: he might be bird-like, costumed, or half-mythical. In every reading he is an airborne creature chasing an airborne thing. The old-fashioned word "quest" lends the errand a fairy-tale seriousness, while the object of it is almost comically small. Then comes "through want of time". "Want" can mean lack, but it also carries a hint of longing, so the man is both short of time and hungry for it. What stops him is not an obstacle but a verb in the passive voice: he "was taken up by joy." Joy is the one acting, and the man is simply collected. "Taken up" also means lifted, so the man ends in the air after all, carried like the kite he was chasing. The title now makes sense. The long search is cut short, and joy turns out to be a shortcut that bypasses its own destination.
The form is spare and quietly clever. There are two tercets and no end rhymes, yet both stanzas close on the same word, "joy", so the only rhyme in the poem is a repetition. The line lengths run roughly eight, eight, six, then seven, nine, seven syllables. The first two lines come close to a four-beat iambic walk ("A MAN with FEATHers WAS in QUEST") before the later lines loosen into speech. Each stanza ends on a shorter line, so the voice drops onto "joy" like a landing. The sound shifts in a way that matches the sense. Line two chimes on the long *i* of "kite" and "time", and its consonants are crisp: *quest*, *kite*, *want*. The second stanza turns soft and rolling, with the matching *-ing* endings of "dancing and tumbling" that keep the motion going.
That second stanza complicates the first. "High words" is a slippery phrase. It can mean lofty, elevated language, the kind of speech a grand occasion might call for. It is also an old idiom for angry quarrelling, and it contains the literal sense of altitude, which suits a poem about kites and feathers. The speaker says such words "would have been better" but does not say better than what, and that gap is where the poem becomes interesting. One reading is that the speaker feels plain words are inadequate to joy, so the poem apologises for its own modesty. Another is that arguing would at least be a recognisable response, and the company is doing something stranger.
What the company does is dance and tumble while being "vexed about joy." The body has accepted joy and the mind has not. "Vexed" is the language of puzzles, as in a "vexed question", so joy is treated as a problem to be worried over even as the people dance inside it. "Tumbling" adds a further note. It suggests acrobats and play, but it can also mean falling, and it is easy to picture a kite spinning down. The poem does not push that image, but it lets the possibility hang there, that joy and loss of control share a vocabulary.
The poem is significant for what it refuses to do. It does not praise joy or explain it, and it does not reward the quest. Joy here is interruptive and a little embarrassing, something that costs the man his errand and leaves his companions uneasy. The diction is deliberately old and plain, almost like a fable that has lost its moral, and the ending offers no resolution. A reader is left with the image of a feathered man lifted off the ground, and with the question of why being happy should be so hard to take.