Three short lines, no punctuation, no names, and Dave Bonta's "Haze" still puts a dying woman in front of us and then declines to explain her. We never learn who she is, who is watching, or what she is dying of. All we get is a situation and an image: a body at work on its last task, and a mind drifting somewhere else entirely.
The first line is the most startling. "Busy with dying" borrows the language of errands, housework and crowded calendars and attaches it to death, so that dying becomes labour, something done with effort rather than simply suffered. The line also has no grammatical subject. "Busy" hangs in the air until "her" arrives in the next line, and even then the link is only implied. It could be the woman who is busy, or the people around her, caught up in the practical bustle that so often surrounds a deathbed. The poem doesn't settle this, and the ambiguity lets both readings sit together.
Then the poem turns inward. "In her mind a haze" inverts ordinary word order, putting the mind first and the haze last, as though the haze were closing round it. Haze usually suggests blur and loss of definition. Judging by the imagery, we might think of confusion, sedation or simply fading attention, but the poem names none of these. It gives us the effect, not the cause. What makes the image memorable is the colour. A haze is normally grey, yet this one is "green," the colour of leaves and new growth, set against the word "dying." The body is shutting down while the mind seems to be somewhere like a garden seen through mist. Green can also suggest youth or inexperience, which adds a faint, odd note of beginning to a poem about an ending.
Then comes "pretty." It is a small, almost girlish word, plain and domestic. It isn't "beautiful" or "serene," the words a more solemn poem would reach for, and the modesty is what unsettles. It sounds like something a child or a visitor might say, and it refuses the grand vocabulary we expect around death. There is also a quiet uncertainty in "in her mind." No one outside can see inside a dying person's thoughts, so the line is an act of imagination, perhaps even of hope. The watcher may be reassuring themselves that the end looks gentle from within.
The sound of the poem supports this. By my count the lines run five, five and four syllables, close to haiku in compression but not in pattern, and the last line falls a beat short, which one can hear as breath running out. There is no rhyme, but "busy" and "pretty" close on the same soft unstressed vowel, so the poem begins and ends on one light sound. "Dying" and "mind" share a long *i*, tying the act to the place where it happens. In the middle, "haze" stands alone, its open vowel and buzzing *z* almost blurring as you say it. The rhythm of the first line, BUS-y with DY-ing, has a faintly nursery-rhyme lilt, a lightness that makes the subject stranger. The final line ends on the falling stress of PRET-ty, and the lack of a full stop means nothing is sealed off. The dying is still going on when the poem stops.
The poem's significance lies in what it holds without resolving. A comforting reading is available: the mind is kind to her, wrapping her in something green and gentle. A colder one is just as plausible: she is already leaving, and the observer is shut out of wherever she has gone. The title adds a final turn. "Haze" names her mental state, but it also describes our position as readers, who see her only through a blur and cannot step inside. In fourteen syllables the poem makes the oldest gap in human experience, between the one who dies and the ones who watch, feel at once tender and unbridgeable.