Nobody lies awake on purpose, and Dave Bonta's five-line poem catches the helplessness of those hours in barely a dozen words. Its subject is insomnia, though the word never appears. The title, "Restless night," supplies the setting, and the poem spends its whole length on one question: what does a sleepless mind feel like from the inside? It answers with two images, and the interest lies in how they differ and how they quietly agree.
The first is the lapwing. "My mind like a lapwing / all a-flutter" makes thinking physical. A lapwing is a bird known for its erratic, tumbling flight, so the comparison suggests thoughts that dart and swerve without landing anywhere. The word "flutter" does some of the work by sound alone, since its quick, light syllables imitate rapid wingbeats. The little "a-" in "a-flutter" gives the word a breathless, old-fashioned lilt, as if the mind were caught mid-motion.
Then comes "or," the poem's pivot. The speaker isn't satisfied with the bird and tries again: "or a lighthouse coursing." The grammar is slightly odd, because a lighthouse doesn't course; its beam does. The poem lets the building stand for its light, so the whole tower seems to sweep through the dark. "Coursing" is usually a word for water, blood or hounds on a chase, and it brings a sense of something running on and on that can't be stopped. The second image is the opposite of the first. The lapwing is small, alive and panicky, while the lighthouse is fixed, mechanical and patient. Yet both are wakeful. A lighthouse exists to stay awake all night, and its light never rests. The poem never mentions darkness, but the lighthouse brings it in.
That small word "or" may be the cleverest moment. The speaker can't even settle on a metaphor, and the mind keeps revising its own description, which is a symptom of the restlessness it describes. The poem acts out the condition as well as naming it.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation, no capital letters and no full stop. The lines run to roughly three, six, four, six and five syllables, so they alternate short, long, short, long, short, like wingbeats or the pulse of a turning beam. The brevity recalls Japanese short forms, though the poem follows no strict syllable count. The sound patterns are quiet but deliberate. The "l" of "long," "like," "lapwing" and "lighthouse" runs through the poem as a soft thread. "Awake," "a-flutter" and "away" all begin with the same open "a" sound, and the last line, "away and away," echoes the first line's "awake," so the poem ends close to where it began.
That ending is the poem's best stroke. "Away and away" can be read several ways. It is the beam travelling out over the water, or the mind drifting from the body, or sleep itself staying out of reach. Because there is no closing punctuation, the phrase doesn't land. It trails off and doubles back on itself, which is the shape of a thought that circles and a beam that sweeps away only to return. Dawn never arrives, and neither does sleep.
The poem's significance lies in how much it leaves out. It names no worry, no cause and no solution, so the reader supplies their own sleepless night. It trusts two images to do what a paragraph of explanation might fail to, and it shows that restlessness has two sides at once: the frantic flutter and the relentless, mechanical sweep. For students, it is a good example of how compression works in poetry. A short poem can feel large when each word, from "flutter" to "coursing" to the doubled "away," has been chosen to move.