The word "flame" never appears in Dave Bonta's three-line poem, yet it burns through every line. The title does the work. "Flamboyant" is an adjective for anything showy and dazzling, and it comes from a French verb meaning "to blaze". It is also the name given to a tree covered in red-orange blossoms. Before the first line begins, the reader is already looking at fire. The poem then uses a very old expectation. The phrase "moth to flame" is so familiar that the ear finishes it automatically, and what Bonta gives us instead is "moth to moth". The doomed attraction between insect and fire is redirected: the moths turn toward each other.
That small substitution changes the poem's mood. The sound of "moth" also sits very close to "mouth", so "moth to moth" is a faint echo of "mouth to mouth" and "face to face". It suggests breath, speech, and closeness. The poem never says this outright, but the near-rhyme between the words makes the idea hard to shake.
The middle line is the longest, and it holds the poem's central image: "we discourse in letters of fire". "Discourse" is a surprisingly formal word for insects. It sounds like something from a lecture hall. Its Latin root means "to run back and forth", which suits the zigzag flight of moths around a light. "Letters" works in two ways. It can mean the characters of an alphabet, as if the moths' looping paths were handwriting traced in light. It can also mean correspondence, messages passed between two parties. "Fire" can be the medium they write in, the thing they are tempted by, or the passion in what they say. The pronoun "we" matters as well. It places the speaker among the moths, so the poem reads as a human voice that has taken on the insects' condition, or perhaps as a shared voice that belongs to both.
The form is as pared down as the image. Counting syllables gives roughly three, eight or nine, and two, which is haiku-like in its compression but does not follow the strict 5-7-5 pattern. There is no rhyme and no punctuation. The long middle line is the "discourse" itself, held between two very short lines, as if the conversation were a small bright space with darkness on either side. The rhythm supports this. "Moth to moth" rocks gently, with a stress on each "moth". The middle line moves in a rising lilt, with three beats falling on *course*, *let-* and *fire*. Then "still free" arrives as two heavy stresses in a row, and the poem stops. The sound of the last two lines links them: "fire" and "free" share their opening f and their r, and they are almost made from the same letters, so the second word feels like the first one set loose.
That ending is where the poem becomes ambiguous. "Still" can mean "yet", which makes freedom precarious. The moths have not been burned so far, and the word carries a quiet sense of time running out. It can also mean "even now, despite everything", which makes the line defiant. Without punctuation, the reader cannot tell whether it is relief, hope, or a boast. The poem also does not say what freedom is being measured against. Judging by the imagery, the danger is the fire itself, and the freedom lies in the talking. The moths are not drawn into the flame, because they are busy writing with it.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In eleven words it takes one of the most worn images of self-destruction, the creature that cannot resist the light, and turns it into an image of communication. The fire remains dangerous and beautiful, and it is never denied. But the poem suggests that when we live close to something that could consume us, one of the things we can do is speak to each other and write, using the danger as our ink. The reader also has to take part. The missing word "flame" has to be supplied from the title, and the meaning of "still free" has to be decided. The poem leaves both of those jobs to us.