Four lines, one sentence, no punctuation and no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Moleish" looks almost like a note jotted in the margin of a thought. It begins as if it were defining something, in the manner of a dictionary entry or a proverb. "The business of the mole / is to face the dark." But by the last line the definition has hardened into a rule of conduct, and the rule is a refusal: the mole must "not take wing."
The title matters more than it first seems to. "Moleish" is not "The Mole," and it is not "Mole" either. The suffix -ish is the language of approximation ("greenish," "tallish"), a way of saying *sort of, in that direction.* So the poem seems to describe a temperament, not an animal. Someone, perhaps the speaker, is mole-like, drawn to staying low, working in the dark, keeping close to the ground. The poem never says "I," but the title hints that the mole is a way of talking about a human choice, and I'd call that an inference from the title, not a certainty.
The word "business" sets the tone. It makes the mole's life a job, something unglamorous and repetitive, rather than a quest. A mole's work is digging, and "business" quietly carries the old sense of being busy. It also puts a plain, workmanlike word beside the heavier language that follows.
That language is "face the dark." A mole is famously poor-sighted, so to "face" the dark is almost a joke: it can hardly do otherwise. Yet "face" turns what looks like a condition into an act of courage, much as a person might "face" a difficulty. The line break then plays a small trick. At the end of line two, "the dark" is a complete noun phrase, a place or a condition. Line three then begins with "bruise," and the reader has to re-hear the phrase as "the dark bruise of home." The darkness becomes a colour, the deep purple-black of an injury, and the underground world turns tender and sore. Anyone who has seen a lawn heaved up by a mole could take the image literally, since a molehill looks like a swelling in the skin of the earth. The metaphor goes further, though. Calling home a bruise suggests that the place where we belong can also be where we hurt, and that staying put means pressing on the sore spot instead of leaving it.
Then comes the final line, and with it the poem's one flash of air: "and not take wing." The idiom usually means to flee, to soar, to be released, and poetry has long been fond of birds as emblems of freedom and transcendence. Bonta lets the wing into the poem only to deny it. The refusal is stated flatly, without any heroic gesture, which makes it more convincing. There is no speech about duty, only the matter-of-fact "and not."
The sound of the poem supports this. The lines shrink, from about five syllables in the first two to three in "bruise of home," and the poem feels as though it is burrowing as it goes. The long *o* of "mole" and "home" echoes across the poem without making a tidy rhyme. The words are alike enough to link the animal to its dwelling, but they stop short of a full chime, so the poem never settles into sing-song. "Face" and "take" share a vowel too, setting the two verbs of action side by side. The closing word, "wing," is also the only one with a bright, ringing *ing*, after a run of low, closed sounds like "dark," "bruise," and "home." It lifts for a moment, and then the poem ends before it can fly.
What makes "Moleish" worth reading is how much it carries in so little space. It offers a counter-image to the usual poetic wish to rise, and it argues, quietly, that there is dignity in staying with what is dark, close, and painful. It does not claim that the mole's life is happy, since the home is a bruise, but it treats that life as one worth choosing. The word "business" suggests that the choice is made through daily work and not through a grand gesture. A reader can take the poem as being about writing, grief, family, or simple endurance, because it names none of them. It leaves the reader, like its mole, to dig in and find out.