The title is only half a sentence. "Plus ça change" opens the old French saying that ends "plus c'est la même chose": the more things change, the more they stay the same. Bonta leaves the ending unspoken and lets the six lines that follow act it out. They sketch the weary disappointment of people who keep hoping society might improve, and who are finally worn down not by any single cruelty but by the stubborn sameness of things.
The first stanza has no main verb, only a comparison set down without anything to hold it together. "Our vexation at expecting change in society" sits beside "an abortive child preserved / fresh in salt." The mismatch is deliberate. "Vexation" is a mild, fussy word, the kind you would use for a delayed train, while the image it is paired with is a dead foetus kept like a museum specimen. "Abortive" works in two senses at once. It describes a child that never came to term, and it also describes any effort that came to nothing, like an abortive uprising. The hope for reform is the stillborn child. Salt keeps it from rotting, and "fresh" is the unsettling word. The disappointment never fades into acceptance. It stays raw because it is carefully kept. Salt is also what stings in a wound and what tears are made of, though the poem leaves those associations unspoken.
In the second stanza, action arrives, and so does bathos. "We press the little ex-hand" is tender, since it suggests holding a small hand, but it also sounds political, like a candidate pressing the flesh. The "we" pulls the reader in. "Ex-hand" is the poem's blackest joke. The prefix is borrowed from "ex-wife" or "ex-president," as if the dead hand had resigned from being a hand. Then comes "after some time at the office," a flat, clerical phrase in which years collapse into routine. Life goes on at the desk while the hope sits in its brine. The last line, "die of apoplexy," uses a deliberately old-fashioned word that means both a stroke and a fit of rage. The vexation of the opening line returns as its own consequence. Anger that has nowhere to go kills the people who feel it, quietly and on the job, while society stays put. The proverb has been completed without being quoted.
The form follows the same logic of shrinking. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letter, so the poem seems to trail off even as it begins. The first line sprawls across fourteen syllables of abstract, Latinate vocabulary ("vexation," "expecting," "society"), then drops to seven and finally to the blunt three of "fresh in salt." The second stanza repeats the fall, from seven syllables to nine and then to the five of "die of apoplexy." Each tercet ends on a short thud, like a door closing. Sound ties the lines together too. The "ks" sound runs through "vexation," "expecting," "ex-hand" and "apoplexy," a small crossing-out mark repeated four times, which echoes "ex" as in former or finished. "Press" and "preserved" share their opening consonants, which suggests the handshake and the pickling belong to one gesture.
The poem is significant for how much it does in under thirty words. Bonta does not argue about politics. He gives disillusionment a body and lets the reader feel its weight. The humor is gallows humor, and there is no consolation at the end. The poem also hints at complicity. The people who mourn the dead hope are the same people who keep turning up at the office, which suggests that their grief and their routine may be part of what keeps things the same. Hope appears as a specimen, kept perfect, kept useless, and in the end fatal to the one who keeps it.