A person lies in bed, fully dressed, for a funeral that hasn't happened yet. That is the whole situation of Dave Bonta's "Day and night," and the poem never explains it. We aren't told whether the speaker is ill, old, grieving or simply worn out. Judging by the text alone, "burying" could be literal, or it could be a way of describing a life that has stopped moving. What the poem is sure of is the feeling: a long, passive wait by day, and at night a need for company, voiced as the plainest request imaginable. Its central idea seems to be that near the end we want not rescue but presence, and presence in the form of song.
The title splits the poem like a diary entry, and the two four-line stanzas follow it: day, then night. In the first, the speaker is the grammatical subject ("I wait"), but the only verb is one of not-doing. Everything else is a condition: in bed, dressed, for burying. By the second stanza the speaker has shrunk into the object of other people's actions: "see *me*," "*my* night." The slide from "I" to "me" to "my" quietly records a loss of agency. The only active verbs left, "come" and "sing," are handed to someone else.
The line breaks carry much of the meaning. "dressed" sits alone on its line, and for a beat the sentence is almost ordinary: *I wait in bed all day, dressed.* Then "for burying" tips it into something stranger. The word choice matters too. "Burying" is not "burial." The participle makes it an action, something to be done to the body with spade and earth, so the speaker becomes an object waiting to be dealt with. And "dressed" suggests tidy preparation, almost a dark politeness, as if the speaker has made themselves ready so as not to be any trouble.
The poem uses no rhyme and no punctuation, and its lines run from one syllable to four. Nearly every word is a single syllable, and "burying" is the only one that stretches. That plainness makes the speech sound unguarded, like someone too tired for ornament. Without commas or full stops, the reader supplies the pauses, and the poem feels hushed and slow. There is some quiet sound-patterning. "Wait" and "day" share a flat, held vowel in the first stanza, while the second gathers a softer chain in "see," "me" and "ease," which is nearly a sigh.
The doubled "sing / sing" is the poem's most delicate moment. The first "sing" finishes the request ("and sing"). The second stands alone on its line, and with no punctuation it can be read as a repeated plea or as the first note of the song itself, the word turning into the thing it names. The hesitation between those readings is where the poem's tenderness lives.
The poem also turns a custom upside down. Singing belongs to funerals, where it arrives after death, for the mourners as much as for the dead. Here the speaker asks for it beforehand, while still able to hear it, and asks for it "to ease my night." "Ease" is a word we use both for pain and for dying, and "my night" is private and possessive, more than mere darkness. The speaker doesn't ask for talk, a cure or an explanation. Song needs no answer and no brave face. Nobody has to find the right words or ask how the speaker is feeling.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. In about thirty words it manages dread, humour of a bleak kind, and a very direct appeal. In the second stanza it turns outward, and "come to see me" is addressed to whoever is reading. In a small way, the reader becomes the visitor, and reading the poem is the act of coming. The poem asks for so little that it is hard to refuse, and it suggests that the song a person needs is often wanted long before the funeral.