Winter is the season we are supposed to endure, and summer is the reward. Dave Bonta's five-line poem turns that arrangement upside down so quietly that the shock only lands in the final line. On the surface it describes a numbed, colourless state of mind: the speaker has forgotten "how to see / and how to live," and the one thing that cuts through is "the saddest news / that we may have continuing summer." The central idea is a strange kind of grief. Warmth, normally a comfort, has become a source of dread, and the poem suggests that something has gone wrong with the seasons themselves.
Start with the title, because the poem does. "In winter" runs straight into "in black and white," so the first line reads as the season described in two colours: bare branches, grey sky, snow. But black and white also means something stripped of nuance, like an old photograph or print on a page. The speaker then says "I forgot how to see," which is an odd confession given that the landscape has just been described so visually. The poem seems to mean that a monochrome world dulls the act of looking itself. The next phrase, "and how to live," joins seeing and living with a plain "and," as though they were one skill that fails together. Neither line has a metaphor or a decorative adjective. The flatness of the statement matches the flatness it reports.
Then comes the poem's one violent verb: "I bled." Everything before it is drained of colour, so bleeding brings in the only red in the poem, if only in the reader's mind. It is a sudden return of feeling, and it is painful. The preposition is interesting too. We bleed *from* a wound, but the speaker bleeds "at the saddest news," as if the news were both the cause and the place of injury. The superlative "saddest" is a big claim for something that sounds mild.
The last line explains the wound, though only by implication. "That we may have continuing summer" would be good news in almost any other context, and the word "may" makes it sound like a hope or a promise. Here it is a threat. Judging by the imagery, a reader can fairly take this as unease about a warming climate, with winter failing to do its work and summer refusing to end. The poem never says so, and that restraint helps it. Naming a cause would turn it into an argument. Leaving the news vague lets the feeling carry, and lets us fill the gap with our own worries. The sad irony is that we may get what winter-weary people always ask for.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, so the poem has the bare look of a winter tree. The lines grow as they go: three or four syllables in the first, then short, parallel clauses ("how to see," "how to live"), then a long, slow closing line. "Continuing" is the longest word in the poem, and it stretches the line out in the same way the summer it describes refuses to stop. The sounds knit things together quietly. "Black" and "bled" share their opening sound, linking the colourless start to the wound. The hissing s in "see," "saddest" and "summer" carries a hushed, almost whispered tone through the second half.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. In five lines it sets up a mood, breaks it with one verb, and then reverses a familiar emotional pattern, so that a whole way of feeling about the seasons is turned inside out. It also shows that a poem about a large, public worry does not need statistics or slogans. A numb winter, a sudden bleed and a mistrusted summer are enough to make the reader feel the problem rather than just know about it. That is why the last line stays with you after the poem has stopped.