Morning usually gets good press in poems. It is the hopeful hour, the clean slate. Dave Bonta's "Void" overturns that in its first line, "morning comes with a bit of hurt", and spends the rest of its short length taking the side of the dark.
The opening is quietly strange. "A bit of hurt" sounds like someone mentioning an ache in passing, a shrug rather than a cry. The poem never says what hurts, and that gap matters. Judging by what follows, the hurt may simply be the pain of waking up, of being returned to a day and a body. Because the cause is withheld, readers can bring their own mornings to it.
The central image arrives in the next three lines: "I continue like a raven / to believe in the night / up above." The verb "continue" suggests stubbornness, a habit of loyalty that carries on whether or not it is rewarded. "Believe" is faith language, and that is odd, because nobody needs faith in something that happens every twenty-four hours. But in daylight the night really is invisible. The blue sky hides the stars, so the night has to be taken on trust, and the poem places it "up above", still there behind the glare. The raven suits this. It is black, and so an emblem of darkness, yet ravens are birds of the day. They fly about in full light. The speaker is in the same position, living through the morning while keeping faith with what the morning has covered over.
The final line is the most puzzling: "so infinite a no body to look after." Its grammar borrows the dignified pattern of phrases like "so great a man", but it puts something startling in that frame, "no body", split into two words. "Nobody" would be an ordinary pronoun. "No body" is an absence with a shape. The phrase also holds two readings of "look after". If it means "take care of", the line could be a lonely one: the night is so vast and so empty that no one is there to tend us. If the sense is bodily, it could be a relief. If the morning's hurt is the hurt of having a body, then an infinite "no body" would mean nothing left to ache and nothing to look after. The poem never chooses between bereft and relieved, and the faith of the earlier lines, which is both devoted and sad, makes room for both. The line also has no main verb. It simply stops, like a thought that has run out of ground.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem reads like thinking caught mid-stream, and with no full stop at the end it stays open like the sky it describes. The shape is a single line, then three, then a single line. The line lengths work like breath. The first two lines run to eight syllables apiece, then the poem shrinks to six and then to the tiny "up above", before the last line spills out to twelve. After "up above" the poem seems to open a door onto the infinite. The sounds are gentle but linked: "believe" and "above" share a soft v, so faith and sky are tied together by ear as well as by sense. "Up above" also has a faintly childlike, sing-song ring, which may make the faith sound old and simple, something held since long before the speaker could argue about it.
What makes "Void" worth reading is its compression and its refusal to settle. The title names the emptiness the poem never directly mentions, and the poem then fills it with the words "infinite" and "no body". The void is not treated as a villain. Morning is where the pain is, and the dark is where the speaker's loyalty lies, even though it offers no one to hold on to. In a handful of lines the poem holds two feelings that normally compete, comfort and loneliness, and leaves them side by side.