Six lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and three questions that never get a question mark: Dave Bonta's "Sea witch" reads like a page torn from a spell-maker's private notebook. The title names a figure from folklore, and it is natural to hear the witch herself speaking. What she says is surprising. She starts out sounding like someone in command and ends up sounding like someone being summoned. That shift, from choosing to being called, is the poem's central idea.
The first stanza sets up the power. "Who shall go into / my book of thorns" treats the book as a place people can be put inside, like a list of names or a catalogue of curses. "Shall" gives the line the ring of a decree. But the book is made of thorns, not paper or ink, so whatever is written in it also wounds, and the witch's power looks like something that hurts her as well. The line break after "into" leaves the reader hanging for a moment before the book appears, and the dropped question mark makes the question feel less like a request for an answer than like something muttered while choosing.
The second stanza turns from people to materials. "Which wing is best / to make the first and last" never says what the wing will make, and the missing object is part of the effect. Judging by the imagery, a wing could be a spell ingredient, or a feather used as a pen, or both at once, which would link the stanza to the "book" above. A bird's wing also belongs to the sky, and the witch belongs to the sea, so the line quietly reaches across two elements. "The first and last" gives an echo of beginnings and endings, as if she is deciding how to open and close something. Even the sound is neat: "best," "first" and "last" all end in the same hard *-st*, a near-chime in a poem that has no rhyme.
Then the third stanza changes the direction of the whole poem: "what land drowned at sea / is calling me home." The "who" of people and the "which" of objects widen to a "what" of whole places. The witch, who has been doing the choosing, becomes the one who is chosen. The phrase "at sea" has a second meaning too, since being "at sea" also means being lost or bewildered. A drowned land is gone from the map, and the one who longs for it is left without bearings. The legends of sunken countries come to mind, but the poem gives no name, which keeps the loss unspecific and therefore larger. The word "home" is easy to pass over, but it carries the poem's feeling. Whatever power the witch has, it cannot bring back the place she belongs to.
The pronouns support this reading. The speaker never says "I." She appears only as "my" in the first stanza, where she owns a book, and as "me" in the last, where she is the object of someone else's call. She begins as owner and ends as the one acted upon, and the grammar tracks that loss of control.
The sound moves the same way. The first stanza is full of hard consonants, such as the *k* of "book" and the *th* and *rn* of "thorns." The final line is made of softer sounds: the liquid *l* in "calling," the humming *m* in "me" and "home," and the long open *o* of the last word. After the prickly opening, the poem comes to rest on a soft sound, and it feels like surrender or relief. The lines are short, running from four to six syllables, so each phrase is brief and hard to pin down, like a fragment of overheard speech.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It takes a figure usually seen from outside, the witch as a threat or a dealer in bargains, and gives her an inner life defined by homesickness. It also shows that a poem can work through questions instead of answers. Nobody replies to "who," "which," or "what," so the reader has to decide what goes into the book of thorns, what the wing becomes, and whether the drowned land can be reached. The poem stops at the moment of being called and leaves the rest to us.