Seven short lines, one sentence, and a whole afternoon ashore. Bonta's "Cargo" gives us a sailor's brief release from the ship: a walk to an alehouse, food and drink, a woman, and a quarrel over cards. The poem never says who is speaking or who is angry, and it never explains its title. That silence is where the poem does its work.
The syntax comes first. "Off the ship that was / at Guinea, walk / to an alehouse" has no subject and no settled tense. The ship "was" at Guinea, so that place is already behind us, but "walk" arrives as a bare command or a quick note, as if the poem were a log entry or a list of instructions. The grammar is stripped down to nouns and movements, which gives the poem a documentary, almost recorded feel. Judging by the clipped style, it could be a fragment of an old account, though the text itself doesn't say so. The line break after "walk" also matters, because the word sits alone at the line's end and the reader steps off the ship with it.
The most interesting thing the poem does is count. "A woman, / cake and the woman / of the house, two / cakes and a pot of ale." The items are tallied the way goods are tallied. Cake, woman, cakes, ale: they sit in one running list, joined by "and," with nothing to separate a person from a pastry. The title makes this unsettling. A reader who sees "cargo" and "Guinea" together will probably think of the Atlantic trade, since the poem sets a ship at that coast. The poem never mentions what the ship carried, but the word "cargo" hangs over the list and makes us ask what is being treated as a commodity. The woman is the clearest candidate. She appears first as "a woman" and then as "the woman / of the house." The article shifts from indefinite to definite, and the repetition leaves us unsure whether these are two women or one, a stranger or a hostess, a companion or a servant. The uncertainty is the point. In a world of inventory, the poem suggests, people blur into things.
The line breaks add to this. "Two" is stranded at the end of a line, and the noun it counts, "cakes," arrives only on the next. The delay is small but makes us wait for the object, as a hungry man might. Lines are short and uneven, running from four syllables to seven, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Yet the sound is not careless. The long *a* of "cake," "cakes," and "ale" runs through the middle lines like a sweet, heavy chime, and the repeated "cake" gives the little feast a comfortable, almost childlike tone. "Walk," "woman," and "pot" are plain, blunt words, with none of the ornament a more romantic sea poem might reach for.
Then comes the last line, which changes the temperature: "angry at cards." It is a fragment that attaches to everything before it. Who is angry, the sailor, the woman, or the whole room? The grammar can't decide, and the ambiguity lets the mood sour without anyone being blamed. Cards also bring in chance, wagering, and loss, so the pleasures of the alehouse end in a small defeat. After all that eating and counting, the poem ends on a feeling, and an ugly one.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It is only forty or so words, yet it implies a voyage, a landing, appetite, money, and the cheapening of human beings, all without a single adjective of judgment. The poem trusts its list and its title to do the arguing, and it leaves the reader to notice what has been packed into the hold alongside the cakes and the ale.