Dave Bonta's "Midnight rider" is six lines long, and almost every phrase in it is slightly wrong in a way that makes you stop. The title promises a lone figure galloping through the dark, something close to a ballad hero. What we get is a speaker with "a tin box." He goes hunting, but not for game. He is bringing "spice to the dead," and the errand ends in failure: "get nothing and see little." The poem is about the effort to reach the past, whether our own dead or history in general, and the near certainty that the effort will come back empty.
The central image is the strangest one. Hunters carry weapons, but this speaker carries a small, homely container, the kind that might hold biscuits or buttons. Spice is a rich word, tied to flavour, trade and, judging by the funereal setting, perhaps to the old habit of treating the dead with aromatic substances. Offering it to the dead is a tender gesture and also a hopeless one, since the dead can't taste anything. The poem seems to understand this. The mix of grandeur and futility, a ritual gift packed in a cheap box, gives the poem its quiet ache.
Then comes "which trouble me." Grammar usually gives people "who" and things "which," so the dead have been turned into objects, or into a vague haunting that the speaker can't quite name. The line can also be read as saying that the whole errand is the trouble. The poem doesn't choose. The semicolon that follows makes a small pause, as if the speaker is admitting something and then pushing on.
The structure helps all this along. The lines are short and unrhymed, and they move in a speech-like rhythm of three to four stresses. Line breaks carry much of the meaning. "With a tin box to carry" stops on "carry," so we wait a beat to find out what is being carried. When "spice to the dead" arrives, it is brief and heavy, and the stress falls on "dead." The punctuation changes as the poem goes on: a comma, a semicolon, a dash, and finally a full stop. Each mark seems to slow the speaker a little more.
The sound is plain, with a few touches. The hard t's gather in the opening lines ("Twelve," "tin," "to carry," "to the dead") and give the walking rhythm a faint rattle, which suits a tin box. The speaker also drops the pronoun in the fifth line. "Get nothing and see little" is clipped and telegraphic, like a note jotted after a bad night. It hides the "I" just as the night hides everything else.
The last line is the hardest and the most rewarding: "like a history of twelve at night." The poem opened on "Twelve o'clock" and now returns to "twelve," so the clock face closes like a ring. Midnight is the moment when one day turns into the next, which makes it a fitting hour for visiting the past. A "history of twelve at night" suggests the record of all the midnights there have ever been: dark, thinly lit, giving little to see. Read this way, history is not a lit museum but a hunt in the dark. We carry our small offerings into it, hoping to meet the people who lived there, and mostly we come back with the same nothing as before. The poem never says whether the speaker is disappointed or just resigned, and that restraint feels honest.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It has a narrative, an odd and memorable object, a moral puzzle and a closing comparison that makes you reread the beginning. It doesn't explain its grief or name the dead, and it doesn't tell us why they trouble the speaker. We are left with a figure on a night errand who is faithful to a ritual that can't work, and who goes on doing it anyway. That choice, to keep bringing the spice, is perhaps the poem's most human moment.