Fear, in Dave Bonta's poem, behaves like a dog that has been out in the dark and come home with something in its jaws. "last night brought back / in the mouth of my fear" – but brought back what? The sentence stops mid-air, and the answer arrives only after the white space between stanzas: "we are not rid of our trouble." The thing retrieved is a recognition, and an unwelcome one. The image of a mouth also does double duty. A mouth carries, but it also speaks, so fear becomes a voice as well as an animal. Given the title, "Fearmongers", that second reading matters, because the people who trade in fear are the ones who put words in our mouths. The poem never says whether "last night" was a dream, a conversation or the news, and it doesn't need to.
The pronouns change as the poem moves. It begins with "my fear", private and singular, and by the second couplet it has become "we" and "our". Having promised fearmongers, we expect the poem to point at someone else. It points inward instead. There is no "they" anywhere in it. "our whole hate business" is the sharpest phrase: "the whole business" is what people say wearily about a tiresome affair, but "business" is also trade, something produced, sold and kept running. Hate here is an enterprise we all have a stake in. The verb is just as telling. "Rid" is the word we use for pests, and "we are not rid of our trouble" has the flat, tired tone of someone who has tried before. The trouble returns the way the dog does.
The last couplet is the riddle. "where a lie is true" is a paradox, and the word "where" turns it into a place, a community or a climate in which falsehood passes for fact. Then comes "it is so much rope". "So much" can be dismissive, as in "so much rubbish", but it can also be literal, a great heap of cord. Rope binds, hauls and hangs. Readers may hear the old saying about giving someone enough rope to hang themselves. The poem doesn't choose, which seems right: a believed lie can tie up the people who believe it, it can be used against others, and it can ruin the people who tell it.
The form is plain and exact. There are three unrhymed couplets with no capitals and no punctuation, so the poem reads like something murmured rather than declared. Nothing is finished with a full stop, which suits a trouble we aren't rid of. The rhythm is uneven in a useful way. "last night brought back" packs four heavy beats into four syllables, and then the line drops away into the softer "in the mouth of my fear", as though the force of the return gives way to the speaker's unease. The final line is five syllables ending on the stressed monosyllable "rope", which lands with a thud and nothing after it. Sound ties the poem together too. The long o of "whole" and "so" comes back in "rope", quietly joining the hate business to the lie.
The word choice is almost entirely simple, and the poem pairs abstractions with physical things. Fear, trouble, hate and lies are all abstract, but fear gets a mouth and lies become rope. That keeps the poem from sounding like a lecture. We don't get an argument about politics or propaganda. We get a few objects that can be felt in the hands and the teeth.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It sets up a chain, from fear to hate to lies, and leaves the reader to work out which link causes which. Its most uncomfortable move is to implicate the speaker and the reader along with everyone else. A poem called "Fearmongers" could easily have been an accusation, but this one is closer to a confession. It leaves us with questions worth discussing. Who is "we"? What exactly did last night bring back? And if a lie is rope, who ends up holding the other end?