Seven short lines, no punctuation, and a title that sounds like a newspaper headline: Dave Bonta's "Divisiveness" promises a commentary on a split society and delivers something closer to a flinch. It never explains why people turn on each other. It catches the feeling of living in a world where they do, and then turns the question back on the speaker.
The first stanza is its most startling. "The morning askew" has no verb, so the day is simply presented, tilted like a crooked picture frame. Then comes the claim that "we hate one another / for being possible." The line break matters here. "We hate one another" is a complete, bleak sentence, and only afterwards does the reason arrive. The reason is not what others believe or do but the bare fact that they could exist. Another person is a living proof that life can be arranged differently, and perhaps that we might have been them. On this reading, hatred is a defence against that unsettling thought. "Possible" is a quiet, almost gentle word, and putting it next to "hate" is what makes the line chilling.
The second stanza switches to the outside world: "in the news / they shot a dead man." The pronouns have shifted from the shared "we" to a faceless "they," and the poem's grammar reproduces the division of its title. The image is deliberately strange. You cannot kill someone who is already dead, so the line suggests violence that is excessive, pointless, or already routine. It could be a body treated as a target, or a story so familiar that the news barely registers a death before moving on. There is also a second meaning the poem may be playing with: in news language, to "shoot" can mean to film. A dead man who is shot again and again as footage is an uncomfortably accurate picture of how images of violence circulate. The phrase "in the news" is flat and offhand, which suits the way such stories arrive between breakfast and the day's work.
Then the poem turns to "I," and its tone changes. "And I must beware of falling / that lasting art" is the longest line in the poem, and it is the one that sounds most like private self-instruction. The sentence is ambiguous, and the ambiguity feels intended. "Falling" echoes the tilted morning, so the speaker seems to be losing balance, but what is it to fall *that lasting art*? One possibility is the art of hating, a skill that, unlike a mood, can be practised and kept up for a lifetime. Another is that the "art" is poetry itself. The danger would then be that writing about violence beautifully, in a polished and durable form, lets us feel superior to it, or lets us escape from it. The poem does not say which, and leaving the phrase unresolved is part of its honesty. Judging by the text alone, the speaker admits that the same pull toward division that produces "we" and "they" is something he could slide into.
The poem's formal choices support this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short and uneven, as if the poem were being said under the breath. The stanzas shrink from three lines to two to two, so the poem seems to run out of room just as it reaches its most serious thought. The lack of capitals and punctuation, apart from the pronoun "I," keeps everything in a low, level voice with no raised tone and no accusation. Some sounds do the work that rhyme usually does. The soft, breathy "being possible" contrasts with the clipped "shot a dead man," and "falling" and "lasting" echo each other with their matching endings, linking collapse and endurance in the final lines.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. A shouting poem about hatred would just be one more example of it. Bonta moves from "we" to "they" to "I," from the crowd to the headline to the self, and ends on a warning rather than a verdict. In doing so he suggests that divisiveness is less a condition of other people than a habit we have to keep refusing, one morning at a time.