Four lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a Latin title carrying two thousand years of grumbling. "O tempora o mores" ("oh, the times, oh, the customs") is the cry most famously linked with the Roman orator Cicero, and it has become shorthand for the complaint that the world is going downhill. Dave Bonta takes that old complaint and squeezes it into two tiny couplets, too spare to be called a sermon. What remains is a diagnosis and a question.
The diagnosis comes first: "the long game is out / the lottery is in." It is phrased like a fashion verdict, the way a magazine announces what to wear this season, and that is both the joke and the sting. Patience, planning, and work whose reward arrives in a future you may not live to see have gone out of style. A sudden fortune bought for the price of a ticket is back in. The pairing is neat because both things are games. The poem does not set play against seriousness. It sets two ways of playing against each other, one that asks for years and one that asks only for luck. "Out" and "in" sit at the line endings like a see-saw, and the identical grammar of the two lines (the X is Y) does the balancing work that rhyme might have done. There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem.
The rhythm tells the same story. "The long game is out" is heavy, with "long" and "game" nearly colliding as stressed syllables, and the line shuts like a door. "The lottery is in" is lighter and almost skips, because the slack syllables of "lottery" make it sound jaunty, which suits something that sells itself as fun.
The second stanza changes grammar and mood. "Shall the road and the light / come again to be ash" uses "shall," a word with a biblical, prophetic ring, and leaves off the question mark. The reader must decide whether this is a question, a fear, or a prediction. The rhythm turns strangely gentle here. Both lines have two beats and the same rocking pattern (shall the ROAD and the LIGHT / come aGAIN to be ASH), like a lullaby or a hymn. Calm music wrapped around burnt ground is unsettling.
The imagery is small but carries a lot. A road suggests direction and a journey, which is exactly what a long game needs. Light suggests guidance, knowledge, hope, or just daylight. Ash is what is left once both are burned. The poem never says what fire it means. Judging by the imagery, it could be an ecological warning about a scorched landscape, or something more figurative about lost direction and lost understanding. The link between the stanzas is implied rather than stated: if nobody plays the long game, the means of going somewhere and of seeing the way may disappear. Sound quietly supports this. The l of "long," "lottery," and "light" threads through the poem and ties the light to the choice made in the first stanza, while "shall" and "ash" frame the second stanza with the same hushing sound.
The most disturbing word is "again." Something that comes *again* to be ash has been ash before. This fits the title, since "O tempora o mores" is a lament every generation has made about the one it lives in. The poem seems aware of that. It could be the perennial complaint of people who think the present is worse than the past, or a real warning that a cycle is repeating. "Again" lets it be both, and it never tells the reader which to believe.
That refusal is what makes the poem worth rereading. It would be easy to write an angry rant about short-term thinking, and Bonta writes four quiet lines instead. It puts a grand classical lament in lowercase and lets the reader supply the fire. The poem is itself brief and quick to read, yet what it praises is slowness, and the question left hanging at the end gives the reader something to do: decide which game they are playing.