Six short lines, and not one airport, suitcase or time zone. Dave Bonta's "Jetlagged" leaves the scenery of travel off the page and keeps only the aftermath: a body that has arrived somewhere before its sleep has. On the surface the poem is about a broken night. Underneath, it is about the moment when exhaustion stops feeling like a problem and starts feeling like a gift.
The first stanza doesn't give us a person at all. "long ear / long eye / open for an hour" offers two body parts, stretched and staring, hanging in the dark without an owner. There is no "I" and no verb, and the only action is the adjective "open." That is a neat way to capture jet lag, when the senses seem to carry on without permission from the mind. "Long" does double work. Judging by the imagery, it suggests the lengthened ears of an animal straining to hear something at the edge of a field, and it also stretches the night itself, since a long ear is one that listens for a long time. Then comes "for an hour," a small, exact measurement. It is a curious unit to find in a poem about losing track of time, as if the speaker is clinging to the one thing the body clock has scrambled.
In the second stanza the "I" finally arrives, and with it a more balanced grammar. "I drowse of necessity / I wake for the same" sets two verbs against each other like a see-saw, and neither is chosen. "Drowse" is a half-word, not quite sleep and not quite waking, and its soft z sound echoes in "necessity," which gives the line a faint hiss, like breath. "Of necessity" has a formal, almost legal ring. The speaker sounds like someone who has stopped arguing with a body he can't command. Even the phrase "the same" is a small piece of compression: waking, like drowsing, happens because it must.
Then the poem turns on a line break. "I wake for the same / grace of God" can be read two ways. Run together, it says that necessity and grace are the same thing seen from two sides: the force that makes the speaker doze is also what wakes him, and both are gift. Pause at the break, though, and "grace of God" lands alone, almost whispered, like the old phrase "by the grace of God," which belongs to the language of gratitude and dependence. The poem never says whether grace means sleep or wakefulness. It leaves that for the reader to settle, and it moves from drowsy resignation to something like thanks without a single exclamation mark.
The sound and shape support this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line begins in lowercase. The only capitals in the body of the poem are "I" and "God," so the self and the divine face each other across a flat, nighttime landscape. By my count the syllables run roughly 2, 2, 5, then 7, 5, 3. The first stanza stutters and then stretches, and the second slowly winds down, ending on the shortest line of all. "Grace of God" settles like a head onto a pillow. The poem is close to haiku in its brevity and its turn, though it doesn't follow the 5-7-5 pattern. The one real sound pattern is the long a in "wake," "same" and "grace," which links the closing lines almost the way a rhyme would.
What makes "Jetlagged" worth reading is the distance it crosses in so few words. Jet lag is a thoroughly modern, slightly comic complaint, the kind we grumble about at breakfast. Bonta sets it beside a phrase that carries centuries of religious weight, and he does so without pomposity or irony. The result is a quiet argument that what we can't control may be received rather than resisted, and that an hour awake in the wrong part of the clock can be a form of attention. It also shows how much a short poem can hold when every word, from "long" to "same," is doing a job.