Twenty words, and a whole argument about who gets to be heard. In "One-sided," Dave Bonta sets two groups against each other without letting them meet: the merchants, loud and comfortable, and "we the people," who are left with a throat and nothing to send through it. The title warns us that the conversation is rigged before we reach the first line.
The first stanza has odd grammar. "the bark of merchants / who took no dole / not knowing any want" is a noun phrase with no main verb. It never says what the bark does. It just hangs in the air like noise from next door. And "bark" carries several meanings at once. It is first a dog's sound, harsh, territorial and wordless, which suits traders shouting orders or prices. But the word also names the thick skin of a tree, which shields what is inside from weather, and, spelled "barque," a sailing ship, which suits merchants too. The poem never chooses between these, and the reader can feel each one: a noise, a hard shell, a vessel that carries goods.
"Dole" is just as slippery. Most readers will hear the handout, the payment to those out of work. But the word also means a portion given out, and an older sense, now mostly preserved in "doleful," means grief. So the merchants either accepted no charity or felt no sorrow. The last line of the stanza delivers the sting. They refused help "not knowing any want." Self-reliance, in this reading, is only what luck looks like from the inside. You cannot take a handout you never needed, and you cannot be proud of declining it.
The sounds back this up. "no dole," "not knowing," "any want" make a chain of rounded n and o sounds, a kind of smug hum. Underneath runs a pattern of negatives: "took no," "not knowing," and finally "could not speak." The poem is made almost entirely of absences, so that the only main verb in the whole piece is an inability.
The second stanza turns from them to us. "we the people" recalls the opening words of the preamble to the US Constitution, a phrase whose job is to speak in the name of everyone. Here it is lowercase, unpunctuated and stripped of ceremony. Then comes "all throat," the poem's shortest line, a body squeezed down to a single organ. The phrase can be read in more than one way. The people might be pure voice, nothing but a cry. Or they might be all tightness and swallowing, a throat that is hungry or choked, which sets them against the merchants who "know no want." The merchants, after all, also bark through a throat. The organ is the same, but one group produces noise and the other produces silence.
None of this is dressed up with rhyme. The poem has no end rhymes, no punctuation and no capital letters, only two tercets of short lines running from two to six syllables. Even so, the shape does the arguing. The first stanza stretches out in longer, easier lines, and the second shrinks to "all throat" and then to "could not speak," where two heavy stresses fall together on "not speak" like a door closing. The merchants get the room and the people get the squeeze, so the poem is as lopsided as its title says.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. It names no country, date or event, so its picture of loud comfort and muffled need can be laid over many situations. It also doesn't lecture. It lets double-edged words like "bark," "dole" and "want" make the case. There is one more irony. The "we" who cannot speak are being described in speech, so someone is speaking after all. The poem itself becomes the voice the people lack, and it leaves us to decide who, if anyone, is listening.