Dave Bonta's "Sad times" begins in the small hours: "I wake by 4:00 o'clock / to any day but my own." It's a strange, slightly dislocating way to start. The speaker doesn't wake into their own life but into "any day," as if grief has loosened the ties between a person and their time. The rest of the poem works out what it means to live in that state, where private loss runs into social ritual, official language and an indifferent natural world.
The middle of the poem is its most vivid stretch. "Here a forest here a clearing / here a dead body and his imp of a fly" reads like a guide pointing things out along a walk, or perhaps a nursery-rhyme pattern. That sing-song listing makes the third item land harder. The body sits in the landscape with no more ceremony than the trees, and the fly is "his imp," a mischievous little attendant that makes death sound faintly comic and faintly diabolical at once. The line doesn't flinch from decay, but it also doesn't mourn in a conventional way. Nature simply goes on with its business.
Then comes the poem's central metaphor: "it is midsummer in the country of grief / nothing is done but trade." Midsummer suggests abundance and light, so the season sits oddly against the sorrow, and calling grief a "country" gives it its own customs and economy. The next lines list what is traded: "dinner for dinner / a fancy tune for a glass." These are small, reciprocal exchanges, a meal answered by a meal, a song paid for with a drink. They sound like the way people actually behave around loss, bringing food, doing favours, keeping the books balanced because nobody knows what else to do. The sharpest turn is "and sorry for however / present a loss." Even "sorry" becomes a currency. The grammar is deliberately slippery. "Present" could be an adjective (a loss that is still here), a verb (to present a loss, like presenting a bill), or even a pun on "a present," a gift. The break between stanzas lets all those meanings hang in the air for a moment, and each makes condolence seem a little more like bargaining.
The last two stanzas change register completely. "I hear that Parliament is against / the scandal of nature" is hearsay, news from somewhere remote and official, and the stiff legal language makes the idea absurd. Institutions can't legislate against death and decay, though they might like to treat them as "scandal." The final couplet is deliciously deflating: nature, "if too much provoked," "shall go to bed." We expect a threat and get a shrug. The solemn "shall" is attached to something as ordinary as sleep. Nature's response to being scolded is simply to withdraw, and the image also brings the poem full circle, from waking at four to going to bed, so the whole thing feels like one long, sleepless stretch.
Formally, the poem is built from seven unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters beyond the opening "I" and "Parliament." That gives it a flat, murmured, half-awake tone, and the couplets work like the small paired exchanges it describes, a line answered by a line. The enjambments, especially "however / present a loss" and "against / the scandal of nature," keep the sense spilling over the line break just when we expect it to settle. The rhythm is conversational rather than metrical, and the plain words ("trade," "dinner," "glass," "bed") keep the poem grounded even when its logic turns surreal.
What makes "Sad times" worth reading is its refusal to be solemn in the expected way. It treats grief with dry humour and a sideways, almost deadpan intelligence, and the humour makes the sadness feel more honest. The title is a flat understatement, and the poem shows how inadequate such phrases are, then fills the gap with images that are odder and truer: the imp of a fly, the country of grief, a nature that would rather sleep than argue with Parliament.