Five small glimpses, and not one of them explains itself. Dave Bonta's sequence moves from a moth to a dewdrop to a dream, a funeral and a kiss, and the connection between them is attention itself. Each haiku records something noticed, and by the last one the speaker is no longer sure the noticing can be trusted.
The first two poems are quiet, almost still. "Moth in our room" gives us a dull landscape with "one / flower pot." The odd word is "landscape." A bare room is made to look like open country, and the moth, tiny and drawn to light, becomes the traveller crossing it. The single flower pot makes the emptiness feel larger. The second haiku turns to brightness: "the finest life" is "drops of dew hanging / on the leaves." "Finest" works two ways, meaning both best and most delicate, and "hanging" holds the drops in a moment before they fall or evaporate. The poem gives no season and no comment, but the idea that the best life is fragile and brief is clear enough.
Then the sequence turns inward. "A finger / to feel my eyes / going to see the queen" is the strangest of the five. Judging by the imagery, it describes the sensation of pressing a finger to closed eyelids and feeling the eyes move beneath them, as happens in sleep or daydream. The eyes are "going" somewhere, off to see a queen, as if they were a separate traveller on an errand. The sense of touch tracks what the sense of sight is doing, and the speaker watches himself from outside. Notice too how the pronouns shift. The first poem says "our room," but from here on it is "my eyes" and "my own journal." The sequence slowly narrows from shared space to private consciousness.
The fourth haiku steps back into the public world with a blunt, almost photographic caption: "black man / in a mourning suit / afternoon chapel." Black appears first as a description of the man, then again, in effect, as the colour of grief. The poem never says who has died or how the speaker feels. It simply sets the three details side by side: a man, his clothes, a time and place. What the reader makes of that stark first line says something about the reader, and the restraint is the point. The speaker is an observer who refuses to invent a story for a stranger.
The final haiku pulls the earlier ones together. "A kiss in the park— / I begin to doubt / my own journal." The dash is a small hinge. Before it comes a moment of real, bodily experience, and after it comes the speaker's suspicion of his own written record. A kiss is vivid and warm, and a journal entry about it can only be a pale copy. The reader has just been handed five journal-like entries, so the doubt spreads backward. Were the moth, the dew and the mourner really as they were written? "Journal" is the last word of the sequence, and it quietly turns the whole piece into a notebook.
Structurally, the poems are loose in the English manner. None follows a strict five-seven-five count, lines run from two syllables ("black man") to six, and nothing rhymes. The line breaks do the shaping instead. "Flower pot" lands as a small, plain object after a long, slightly grand phrase, and "afternoon chapel" closes on a flat, factual note. Almost every poem leans on seeing and recording: "eyes," "see," "journal," even the moth in a lit room. Watching is the real subject, more than any of the things watched.
This is why the sequence is worth reading. It uses haiku's usual virtues of compression, concrete images and an unexplained gap between them, and then applies them to the act of observing itself. Most haiku trust the moment, but the last one admits that a moment fully lived may not survive being written down.