A dozen words, five short lines, and a pun that turns a bad night inside out. Dave Bonta's "Morning-mare" begins by tampering with a familiar word. Swap "night" for "morning" in "nightmare" and the dark dream wanders into daylight. The hyphen makes the new word feel coined on the spot, and the colon after it works like a dictionary entry: here is what a morning-mare *is*. The answer is "a red ride."
That phrase carries a lot. The "mare" in "nightmare" originally meant a tormenting spirit, not a horse, but the poem's next word, "ride," makes the horse reading hard to resist. Suddenly the nightmare is something we are sitting on, galloping and out of our control. The colour matters too. Red could be the colour of dawn, of danger, of blood, or of the glow you see through closed eyelids as you wake. The poem doesn't choose, and the ambiguity is part of its energy. Dawn and alarm arrive in the same syllable.
The sound of the opening lines is tightly knit. "Morning-mare" repeats its m and r sounds, and "red ride" echoes itself with an r at the start of each word and a d at the end. The two stressed syllables of "red ride" land side by side, with no unstressed syllable between them, which gives the phrase a jolt, like a hoof striking ground. There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem. "Mare" and "are" look as if they might chime on the page, but they sound different, and that missing click leaves the ending open instead of neatly sealed.
The turn comes with "but." Before it, the poem has told us we are falling, and the line "We are falling" tumbles out in four syllables, with the weak "We are" rushing into the stressed "fall." After it, "but we go" is short and flat-footed, three plain words, and "go" is a notably neutral verb. It doesn't say "climb" or "rise" or "soar," which would suggest effort or triumph. We simply go, carried like passengers on that red ride, with someone or something else holding the reins. Repeating "we" at the start of two lines also keeps the experience shared. Nobody falls alone here.
Then comes the final line, a single word: "up." Its placement is the poem's best trick. Because "go" ends its line, the reader's mind briefly leaves the sentence open. We might expect "go on" or "go down," and "up" arrives alone on its own line and flips the direction. The word that means rising is also the lowest thing on the page. The eye drops down the poem even as the sense lifts, so the layout enacts the paradox it describes: falling and rising happening at once.
What is the paradox about? The poem allows several readings, and judging by the imagery, a few stand out. The most immediate is waking. Many people know the lurch of a falling dream, and the instant of waking jerks us upward out of it. Seen this way, the fall is the route to the surface. A second reading is a sunrise, with the red light climbing while we tumble out of sleep into the day. A third is more general: the poem might describe any frightening experience that, against expectation, carries us somewhere higher. The poem never says which it means, and the reader can choose.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. In the space of a breath it reinvents a common word, uses a line break as a hinge, and makes the page itself act out its contradiction. It also changes the nightmare's usual meaning. A nightmare is something we endure and escape, but the morning-mare is something we ride, and it ends up taking us the right way. That makes it a small lesson in how a poem can hold two opposite ideas at once and give both of them the last word.