Anyone expecting "arr" and "matey" from a poem called "Talk like a pirate" will be surprised by Dave Bonta's version. The only obvious pirate props are the sea, a captain and a tavern. What he gives us instead is a kind of speech: riddling, circular and quietly mocking. The poem's central idea is that talk can dress up anything, so that greed becomes principle and a pub becomes a parliament. In the end it is talk, not treasure, that gets traded.
The opening image sets the tone. "The sea, to our great / wonder, is a well." A sea is wide and open, a well is narrow and deep, and the line turns the horizon on its side. Suddenly the ocean is something you lower a bucket into and draw stories from. The line break after "great" holds back the word "wonder" for a moment, so the reader feels a small version of the speaker's astonishment. The pronoun "our" suggests a crowd of listeners, and the next line singles out one voice: "Captain, tell me stories."
Those stories are the most inventive part of the poem. Each of the three is a small loop in which something acts on itself: "cards playing cards, / money that lost money, / greed made a creed." People have disappeared from the picture. Cards play without players, and money loses without a loser. Even the sound folds back on itself, since "cards" repeats, "money" repeats, and "greed" and "creed" differ by a single consonant. That near-rhyme is the poem's sharpest joke. It shows how little separates a vice from a doctrine: change one sound and appetite becomes belief. The poem has no regular end-rhyme scheme, which makes the pairing stand out more. There is a quieter echo earlier, too, in "well" and "tell" across the line break, as if the story is already rising out of the water.
The second half changes grammar. The stories were statements, but now the poem gives orders: "O talk high of France / for a fine country." The old-fashioned "O" turns the speaker into someone making a formal appeal, though the request is oddly slippery. "For" could mean "as", so the instruction might be to talk of France as though it were a fine country, and that carries a hint of pretending. The next lines work the same way: "the tavern for a parliament." The tavern is offered as a stand-in. Here the poem seems most pleased with itself, because "parliament" comes from a word for speaking, and the place where people talk is exactly what a tavern is. A drinking room and a seat of government turn out to have the same business.
The last phrase, "staid in talk," is deliberately ambiguous. Read one way, it describes the parliament as sober and dignified, a place where talk is formal and settled. "Staid" also sounds like "stayed", though, which hints at being stuck, going nowhere. The poem ends on the word "talk" itself, and it has appeared three times by then, in the title, in "talk high" and here. Such repetition makes the point that these institutions, and perhaps the poem too, are made of nothing but words.
The rhythm is loose and speech-like. Lines run to three or four stresses, and breaks fall in awkward places ("great / wonder," "a parliament / staid"). That suits a poem about oral storytelling, because the voice seems to be improvising and pausing to find its next image. The vocabulary is plain and short, so the strangeness comes from how the words are combined, not from showy diction.
The poem is significant because it uses a playful, almost throwaway instruction to raise a serious question about how language works. If you can talk of a tavern as a parliament, or of greed as a creed, how much can you trust any grand name? At ten short lines, it leaves the reader with a kind of pirate's trick: the most valuable thing on board is the ability to make one thing sound like another.