Thirteen words and a medical title: that is all Dave Bonta gives us in "Iritis." The word names an inflammation of the iris, the coloured ring of the eye, but the poem never explains it. Instead it lets a sore eye speak the only way it can, in clipped fragments that read as if written with one eye shut. The text tells us almost nothing about the speaker beyond the word "my," but that is enough to suggest someone facing a day they cannot comfortably look at, and trying to say exactly how it hurts.
Look at the grammar first. The poem has no verbs. "Day and my eye / ill still" is a pile of nouns and adjectives, a snapshot of a condition rather than an event. Nothing happens, because illness has stripped the day of action. "Still" does double work here. It means "continuing," so the speaker is still ill, and it means "motionless," so the speaker is ill and forced to be still. Since "ill" and "still" rhyme perfectly, the line shuts like a lid. The pairing of "day" with "my eye" may also hint at glare. Light sensitivity is a common symptom of iritis, so the day may be less something the eye sees than something it has to endure. That is an inference, but the poem's compression invites it.
The second stanza begins with a half-heard cliché. "Plain as day" is an old idiom, and the poem splits it: "day" sits in the first line, "plain as" arrives two lines later. The reader's ear expects the familiar ending, and the poem swerves instead to "an ember in amber." The line break after "as" suspends the comparison, as if the speaker is searching for the right image. "Pain" and "plain" differ by a single letter, an *l* slipped into the word, and the slip carries meaning. Pain makes itself obvious and undeniable, and it also strips everything else down to something unadorned.
The closing image is the poem's richest. An ember is alive and hot, a coal that glows without blazing. Amber is cold, hard, translucent resin, the stuff that traps and preserves whatever falls into it. Put together, they make fire that cannot move, or pain that smoulders steadily and refuses to fade. The colours also match, since both ember and amber glow orange-gold. Amber is a familiar word for eye colour, too, so the image may quietly bring us back to the inflamed iris of the title. That is a reading of the imagery, not something the poem states.
The sounds do as much work as the images. The poem is built from near-twins: ill/still, pain/plain, ember/amber. Each pair repeats itself with one small change, a letter added or a vowel shifted from *e* to *a*. The effect is of a throb that keeps returning, or perhaps of the slightly doubled, blurred vision of a sore eye. The rhythm helps. The first stanza is all blunt monosyllables, and "ill still" lands two heavy beats together, slowing the line to a halt. The lines then lengthen, from four syllables to two, then three, then five. In the last line the pace finally loosens into the soft lilt of EM-ber in AM-ber, the only moment where the poem relaxes into music, as though the pain, once given an image, has somewhere to settle.
That is the poem's quiet achievement. Pain is notoriously hard to describe, and a longer poem might have listed symptoms or complained. This one does the opposite and finds a shape for the feeling in sound and image. It also does not pretend the hurt is anything but hurt. Yet amber is a prized, almost jewel-like substance, and an ember has its own glow, so a flicker of beauty survives inside the suffering. The smallness of the poem mirrors a patient's narrowed world, and the care in its wording shows attention surviving discomfort.
For a student reader, "Iritis" shows how much a few words can carry when every sound is chosen. It also shows how a worn-out phrase like "plain as day" can be broken apart and made new.