Holidaymakers are people who have agreed, for a week or two, to forget something. Dave Bonta's six-line poem takes that small social bargain and shows what it is covering up. In just over twenty words, a seaside break becomes a rehearsal for the one subject nobody on holiday wants to raise: that everything finishes.
The opening couplet sets the terms. "we kiss and do not tell / how all things end" is gentle on the surface, but the grammar leaves a question open. Who is not telling whom? The couple might be keeping the truth from each other, or from everyone else, or from themselves. Either way, the kiss works as a way of keeping quiet, since a mouth that is kissing cannot say anything. The phrase "all things" is enormous, and it makes the secret much larger than the end of a holiday or a romance. The first line settles into an almost regular rhythm, so it sounds easy and comfortable, and then "how all things end" shortens to four syllables and drops like a verdict.
The second couplet is the strangest. "profess great kindness / at a plague house" turns on the verb. To "profess" is to declare something publicly, as people do with vows or faiths, and it carries a hint that the declaring may be louder than the feeling. Add the faintly exaggerated "great," and the kindness begins to sound like a performance. The "plague house" can be read in at least two ways, and the poem does not choose. It might be a literal place, perhaps a building visitors tour as a curiosity, where the polite things people say cost nothing because the danger is long past. Or it might be the holiday itself, a place where everyone is quietly infected by mortality and is being nice about it. The imagery suggests the second reading is at least possible, because the poem never says the plague is over. Kindness offered by people who can leave at the end of the week is not quite the same as kindness offered by people who must stay.
Then the poem turns, and the pronoun turns with it. "We" gives way to "I": "I hear that pretend mouth / the evening sea." The speaker steps out of the shared pretence and listens alone. The syntax is deliberately odd. "Pretend" is used as an adjective, the way a child would say "pretend food" or "pretend house," and that childlike word is eerie here. The line break also leaves "mouth" hanging for a moment before the sea arrives to explain it. The sea has been given a mouth, which echoes the kissing mouths of the first couplet, and it too is pretending. Perhaps it is murmuring reassurance while it goes on doing what the sea does, or perhaps its soothing, rhythmic hush is the same polite lie the holidaymakers tell. "Evening" matters as well, because the day is ending just as the poem's "all things" end.
The poem does not rhyme, and it has no punctuation at all. Each line begins in lowercase, which keeps the voice quiet and almost whispered. Sound does the work that rhyme might have done. "Profess," "plague," and "pretend" form a chain of p sounds, which are made by pressing the lips together and releasing them, so the words themselves seem to come from the mouth the poem keeps returning to. The soft hiss of "kiss," "things," "house," and "sea" adds a sound like surf underneath. Because there is no final full stop, the poem never formally ends, which is a pointed choice for a poem about endings. It simply trails off into the sound of the sea.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves for the reader to complete. It is as compressed as a haiku, yet it holds a whole attitude toward death: we are polite about it, we are affectionate in its presence, and we hush it with pleasant noises. Its title is part of the joke. Holidaymakers are, quite literally, makers of a holiday, people who build a pretend world for a short time. The poem lets us enjoy that world and then lets us hear, at evening, how thin its walls are.