Haiku are supposed to be small, quiet and full of weather. Dave Bonta's "Warmongers: six haiku" keeps the smallness and drops the calm. Its subject is what surrounds war rather than war itself: the maps, the bargains, the hushed-up crimes, the applause. No battle is described. Instead we get six glimpses of the damage done before, during and around the fighting, and the title makes us ask who the warmongers are. The soldier is one candidate. The sequence suggests the others are far more numerous and much closer to home.
The form matters here. English haiku is often taught as a strict 5-7-5 pattern, and these poems ignore it. "a half-moon / over the maps of several / poor countries" runs short, long, short, and the middle line sprawls the way a map does. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line begins in lower case. The poems feel overheard rather than composed. The one real borrowing from haiku is the cut, the sudden placing of two images side by side. A gentle half-moon hangs over maps, and the word "poor" then turns the scene political. A moon is the oldest image in the genre, and here it looks down on a planner's table.
From that remote starting point the sequence moves steadily into rooms, beds and stairwells. The second haiku has the most unsettling grammar: "that sullen bastard will go at midnight / take the child and dance it / in his arms." The future tense sounds like a threat. "Dance" suggests tenderness, yet the child becomes "it," an object handled rather than a person held. The cursing in the first line is a jolt in a form that usually avoids it, and the roughness feels deliberate. Three haiku later the sequence reaches its coldest line: "going to be married / so the rape is hushed up / mouths receive the sacrament." Marriage becomes a cover story, and the sibilance of "so," "hushed," "mouths" and "sacrament" works like a finger to the lips. The mouths that might have spoken are filled with communion bread. The poem never says that the community and the church are complicit, but its images lay the point out.
The fifth haiku picks up that language. "whose bread / would pay for a war / blood on the back stairs" has no question mark, though it reads as a question. Bread and blood, the communion pair, return here as the basic cost of war. The bread is the daily food of ordinary people, and the blood lies on the back stairs, the servants' route, out of sight. The line break after "bread" leaves it hanging, a small hunger of its own.
Not every poem looks at victims. The third looks at fantasy: "guarded by his horse / the soldier is a flying army / in his head." The reversal is telling, because the horse guards the man and the man is not the strong one. Whatever grandeur he has exists only "in his head." One body imagines itself as a whole army, and the scene is slightly comic and slightly pitiful. That is how the poem treats the appeal of war: as a dream that individuals carry into real violence.
The final haiku is the hardest to pin down: "not capable of bearing children / they clap for the chance / to meet death." The "they" is left open. The poem seems to point at a crowd cheering for war, and the opening phrase sets those who cannot give life against those who applaud its ending. Whether the phrase is literal or a bitter metaphor, the verb "clap" is chilling because it is the sound of a theatre audience, not of grief.
The poem's significance lies in this pairing of a calm form with an ugly subject. Because each haiku is so short, the reader has to fill the gaps, and that makes the reader a witness. Nothing is explained or resolved, and the sequence ends on applause rather than comfort. The poem argues that war depends on silence, on distance, on bread taken from the poor, and on people willing to look at a map and not at what it stands for.