Two kinds of looking drive Dave Bonta's "From a distance": being watched by someone you cannot see, and finally looking into a face with nothing left to hide. Over six unrhymed tercets the distance of the title shrinks until the speaker is bending over a wounded soldier.
The poem opens in paralysis. The speaker has "stood frozen in the hot street / with rifles pointing at my crotch," a blunt, bodily phrase that picks out the most vulnerable target and offers no dignity. Judging by the imagery, this is an occupied place, with foreign soldiers on patrol and a local man who has to endure them. The mosque is the only other detail the poem gives. What matters more is how the speaker is seen. He watches himself "small / & impossibly thin" in "the oil-black / mirrors of their sunglasses." The soldiers' eyes are hidden, and all he gets back is a shrunken copy of himself. "Oil-black" makes the lenses slick and opaque, almost toxic, and the speaker is reduced to an image on a surface.
"God knows" appears at the start of the first and second stanzas, and its tone shifts. The first time it is a weary figure of speech for "too many times to count." The second time, in "God knows / they are easy to hate," it sounds like a grudging confession. The word "easy" matters. The speaker doesn't say the soldiers deserve hatred, only that hating them takes no effort, and that quietly prepares for the shame to come. The ampersands and dashes give the voice a jotted, conversational feel, as if the experience is being told in a rush. The detail that the soldiers never remove their sunglasses, "not even / to enter a mosque," stacks one more small disrespect onto the pile.
The hinge comes with the explosion, and the syntax turns with it: "But after the explosion when / I ran with the others to look, suddenly / I felt shame." The enjambment carries us across the line breaks as the speaker runs. We never see the blast, only its aftermath, and the poem compresses that into one contrast: "One howled, the other / bled in silence." The silent man's "eyes naked / to the sun" reverse the opening. The sunglasses are gone, though the poem implies this rather than saying it. "Naked" lands at the end of its line, and the vulnerability that began with the speaker's crotch has passed to the soldier. The speaker's own shame is left vague, "all the things / I had thought," which feels honest. He doesn't list his thoughts, because he doesn't need to.
Then comes "I bent down," a short sentence that ends its stanza. After all that frozen standing, it is the poem's first deliberate act. What he sees is "Above the smooth cheeks / such a clear, pale blue!" The "smooth cheeks" suggest a very young man, and the poem's only exclamation mark records the speaker's surprise. Clear blue answers oil-black: after the mirrors that gave nothing back, here are eyes that can be looked into. The speaker feels "as if / I were looking down from heaven," which is literally true, since he is leaning over, and also a shift in perspective. "God knows" has been the poem's refrain, and now the speaker briefly takes up the view it implied. The title pulls two ways. Distance is what made hatred easy, and the poem suggests compassion arrives only when that distance collapses.
The final stanza is almost plain speech. "Here is our sky, soldier, / here is yours" can be read as the sky overhead that both men share and the sky he has just seen in the soldier's eyes. Either way, the speaker claims common ground. The last two sentences, "Hold on. / Help will come," are short imperatives of the kind said to the injured. The speaker cannot know the promise is true, which makes it feel less like a statement and more like an act of care.
The poem's strength lies in what it refuses to do. It never retracts "easy to hate," and it doesn't pretend the fear in the first stanza was foolish. Compassion arrives anyway, through one image, a patch of blue where there had been black glass, and without a speech.