Hatred is usually pictured as hot: boiling, burning, flaring up. Dave Bonta's "Mare Frigoris" goes the other way. The title is Latin for "Sea of Cold," the name of a dark plain on the Moon, and like all the Moon's "seas" it contains no water. That paradox shapes the whole poem. It gives us a sea that is really a desert, and a feeling that is hidden, frozen and going nowhere.
The opening is flat and plain: "I have a secret hate / like a private sea." The two adjectives do almost the same job, as if the speaker were sealing the feeling in twice. The simile makes the hate vast but also entirely his own, a body of water nobody else can sail on. Then the poem's grammar starts to wobble. "That taste of ships put out to rust" uses "taste," not "tastes." If the "that" points back to the sea, the verb should be singular. Whether this is a deliberate slip or not, the effect is of thought running ahead of syntax. The sensory move is striking too. Hate becomes something tasted, and rust leaves a metallic, blood-like flavour in the mouth. "Put out to rust" also echoes the familiar phrase "put out to pasture," so the ships become retired workers, built for voyages and left to corrode.
The next line, "that anything other than desert," never finishes. The repeated "that" at the start of both lines gives the middle stanza a stammering, circling quality, like a mind going over the same grievance again. The clause hangs open, and we have to supply what it means. One possible reading is that the hate is so barren and bitter that even a desert would be an improvement. Another is that the sea is a desert, and anything else would be a mercy. The poem doesn't choose between them, which suits a feeling that is meant to stay secret.
The final stanza turns the ship image into a journey: "a voyage to white hair and ill health." The ships were rusting, yet the voyage still happens, and its destination is old age. The poem doesn't say whose white hair this is. It could be the speaker's own, since a grudge can age the person who carries it. It could be the fate he wishes on the enemy. The ambiguity is useful, because the two possibilities blur together. Then comes the bluntest moment: "my head full of how to get rid / of my enemy." The sea has moved inside the skull. The phrase "get rid of" is oddly casual, the language you'd use for clutter or pests, and the line break after "rid" lets the word hang for a moment before the object arrives. Nothing is dressed up. There is no full stop either. The poem contains no punctuation at all, so it stops rather than concludes, and the obsession simply carries on past the last word.
Formally it is free verse, with no rhyme and a stanza pattern of two, two and three lines. The short lines make the rhythm halting. The sounds help. The clipped consonants of "ships put out to rust" feel brittle, and "white hair and ill health" is slow and breathy, with its repeated h and l. Capitals appear only at the start, which adds to the sense of something quiet and unceremonious.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty and compression. It doesn't make hatred noble or tragic, and it doesn't offer a lesson or a cure. The grand, cold, astronomical title sits against a very small, human thought, and that gap is the point. A name like "Sea of Cold" promises something majestic, but what the poem finds there is rust, dryness and a head crowded with plans. The unnamed enemy and the unfinished sentences keep the reader at the edge of the feeling rather than explaining it. In a handful of lines, the poem shows hate as a place you can live in so long that it starts to look like geography.