Four short lines, no punctuation, and an entire planet to run away to: Dave Bonta's "Colonist" fits a lot of human awkwardness into fourteen words. The title tells us who is speaking, a settler on Mars. What the settler says is not a report on red dust or thin air but a muttered prayer, and the prayer is a complaint about being ordinary.
The central idea is that moving does not change who we are. A colonist presumably leaves one world hoping to become someone larger on another. The speaker suspects the reverse, that the old self has come along in the luggage. The small word "too" carries the weight. "Must I / be ordinary too" quietly admits that everyone else is ordinary, that the speaker has always been, and that Mars was supposed to be the exception. The poem never answers, but its tone suggests the answer is yes.
The first line is the strangest: "where sin and creed play". It begins in lowercase, with a "where" that has nothing to attach to, so we feel we have walked in on the middle of a thought. The line can be read as a description of the world left behind, or, because the sentence runs on to the final word, as a description of Mars itself: *on Mars, where sin and creed play*. Both readings work, and that is the point, since the poem blurs the difference between the old world and the new. The verb "play" is also rich. It can mean children at play, actors in a play, or the slack in a badly fitted machine. Sin and creed, wrongdoing and belief, are usually set against each other, but here they are playmates, two halves of one old game that humans seem unable to leave behind. I would call this an inference, but the word "colonist" invites it, since colonists in many periods have carried both their faults and their faith with them.
Then the voice changes. "O Lord must I" drops the scene-setting and turns to address God directly. The "O" is old-fashioned, the kind of exclamation we associate with the Psalms in English, and it sits oddly beside the idea of a space settlement. The line break leaves "I" stranded at the end of the line, a lone self pausing before it finishes the question. The next line then slows down with "ordinary," a long, plain, slightly sagging word after all the clipped ones. It may also carry a churchly overtone, as in "ordinary time" in the Christian calendar, so even the complaint about dullness is dressed in religious vocabulary.
The sound and shape are quietly deliberate. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. Instead the lines shrink, from five syllables to four to about five or six, and then to two, so the poem narrows like a funnel toward "on Mars." That last phrase is a deliberate anticlimax, two heavy beats arriving after the grand question like a door closing. There are small echoes too. "Must" and "Mars" share their opening sound, linking the speaker's compulsion to his destination. And Mars is named for the Roman god of war, so a prayer to the Lord ends on the name of another god, which seems a gentle irony and perhaps another sign that old beliefs have followed him there.
The missing question mark and full stop help the effect. The question does not demand an answer, and the poem simply stops, leaving the speaker hanging in his own wish. The tone is hard to pin down. It is half comic, with the grand gesture of interplanetary travel punctured by a very small, human grumble, and half sincere, since the plea has real longing in it.
The poem is significant because of how much it does with so little. It takes a familiar science-fiction setup and uses it to ask an old question: if we could start again somewhere else entirely, would we be any different? Its answer, folded into a single "too," is wry and a little tender. The furthest change of address leaves us with the same temptations, the same beliefs, and the same ordinary selves, and the poem asks God, perhaps without much hope, for a reprieve.