Nineteen words, not counting the title, are enough for Dave Bonta to fit a kiss, a night sky and a grieving woman into one dark space. The poem is built from two couplets. The first says that a kiss communicates, but not through language: it speaks "no word but ourselves." The second reaches for a comparison that shifts the mood, likening the moment to "the ink of night lost / in her mourning gown." Its central idea is that tenderness and sorrow can wear the same color. What is felt most deeply slips past words and disappears into darkness.
The opening line, "how lightly a kiss speaks," has no punctuation, so it can be read as a gasp of wonder or as a quiet observation. The word "lightly" matters here. It means gently, but it also contains "light," which sits oddly under a title about black. The kiss is weightless and almost a flicker, yet the verb is "speaks," not "touches." The next line complicates this. A kiss that speaks "no word but ourselves" delivers no message at all. The lovers, or whoever "ourselves" includes, are the message. The plural reflexive has no "we" to act on it, so the pronoun seems to turn in on itself, which suits an act with nothing outside it to say.
The second couplet changes the picture. After a line that denies words, the poem produces "ink," the substance words are written in, and then immediately drowns it. Ink of night is darkness imagined as writing fluid, but it is "lost / in her mourning gown." Black ink on black cloth is unreadable, so the simile does the opposite of what similes usually do. Instead of clarifying the kiss, it makes it harder to see, and that is the point. The line break also helps: "lost" is left stranded at the end of a line before the gown arrives to swallow it.
The sudden "her" is the poem's quiet puzzle. We move from the shared "ourselves" to a single woman in mourning, and the text never says who she is. Judging by the imagery, she might be the beloved, a widow, or simply a figure the mind conjures as the kiss fades. Either way, grief now sits behind the intimacy, and the kiss begins to read as comfort, farewell, or both. There is also a sound-play: "mourning" is pronounced like "morning." Night lost in morning suggests darkness dissolving at dawn, while the spelling keeps the dress in grief. Whether or not Bonta intended the echo, a listener hears both at once.
The form is spare. The lines run six, five, six and five syllables, which gives the poem a gentle see-saw, as if it were breathing in and out. There is no rhyme at the line ends, but sound still links the lines: "lightly" and "night" share an echo across the two couplets, and the hissing s-sounds of "kiss speaks" and "ourselves" make a hush, as though the poem were lowering its voice. All the words are lowercase and there is no final full stop, so the poem never announces an ending. It simply trails into the dark it describes.
The title, "Black is the color," is an unfinished sentence, the sort that seems to be waiting for a completion. It may recall the traditional folk song of similar name, though that is only an inference from the wording. Either way, the poem completes the thought in its own fashion. Black is the ink of night, the cloth of mourning, and perhaps the privacy in which a kiss can say what language cannot.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds without explaining. It does not tell us whether the kiss belongs to love, loss, or the uneasy territory between them, and the reader has to decide. A short poem like this shows how compression can work in the reader's favor. A few images, a single simile and a missing full stop leave room for the questions the poem never answers. For students, it is a useful example of how a simile can deepen mystery instead of dispelling it.