Anyone who knows the saying attributed to Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living, will recognise the title of this short poem as its opening half. Dave Bonta leaves off the verdict and offers six unpunctuated lines instead. They suggest that examining a life has a price, and that the alternative to paying it may be a handful of comforting fictions. The poem sets a painful question against the moon, the most overworked consolation in poetry, and refuses to let either one win.
The first stanza is built on a paradox. A question is "sore as a scar", yet a scar is supposed to be what remains after the hurt has healed. Here it still aches when touched, so this is an old question that keeps being pressed. Bonta then personifies it. The question "would go to a good grave", and the strange phrase "good grave" makes burial sound almost respectable, like a decent funeral after a long illness. The sounds help: *go*, *good* and *grave* lean on one another, so the line closes like a lid. The last line, "not send a letter to hope", is the most striking. A letter is slow, formal and faintly old-fashioned, the kind of thing you write when you expect an answer. To send one to hope is to address it as a distant relative whose reply you can't count on. The question would rather lie quietly in the ground than write that letter. The poem leaves out any "rather than" between the two clauses, so the line break has to carry the logic. That gap makes the refusal sound flat and stubborn.
The second stanza turns from the question to the moon, and the lines shrink to four syllables, four syllables, then six. "Here lies the moon" borrows the formula of a gravestone, which seems to answer the grave of the first stanza. But the verb carries a second meaning. The moon also *lies*, in the sense of telling falsehoods, and the final line confirms it: it is "telling pretty stories". The word "telling" does double duty again in the middle line. The moon is "great as a clock", and a clock tells time, since the moon's phases mark off the month. So the moon is both timekeeper and storyteller, a reliable presence that also dresses things up. "Pretty" is the poem's quietest insult. Stories that are merely pretty are not true, and they probably aren't brave either.
On the page the poem is stripped down. Everything is lowercase, there is no punctuation, and there is no end rhyme. What holds it together is sound and syntax. The *s* and *k* sounds in "sore as a scar" and "question" return in "clock" and "stories", and the long *o* of "go", "hope" and "moon" recurs through both stanzas. The first stanza runs on in longer lines (seven, six, seven syllables) and sounds like one tired thought. The second is clipped, as if cut into stone. Because nothing is punctuated, the reader has to decide where one thought ends, and that decision is part of the meaning.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it settles. It would be easy to read it as a rejection of false comfort, with the moon exposed as a liar and the honest question preferred. But the question isn't rewarded either. It is sore, it is buried, and it won't appeal to hope. Judging by the imagery, the poem sees two bad options: live by pretty stories, or live by questions that hurt and lead nowhere. Its title hints at the third, an unexamined life, without saying whether that would be worse. Sly humour keeps the poem from becoming merely gloomy. The pun on "lies" and the odd, almost cheerful "good grave" show a speaker who can distrust consolation and still enjoy the language that offers it.
For a student, the lesson is how much a poem can do by compression. In six lines it takes a famous maxim, tests its cost, and leaves the reader holding the question it describes.