Three words in quotation marks do a surprising amount of work here. Dave Bonta's title, «Thoughts and prayers», is a stock phrase of public sympathy, the sentence people reach for after a tragedy when they want to say something and have nothing to say. The poem never repeats it. Instead it answers it, in nine short lines, with a picture of what tragedy feels like from inside the flood of reporting, and of what it costs the person who loses the most.
The first stanza gives the news a body. It is "touching us," as if it had hands, and the verb is pointed because touch is exactly what a formula like "thoughts and prayers" avoids. Then comes the strangest line, "too mad for madness." "Mad" can mean insane or furious, and both fit. But the word seems to burst out of its own noun. "Madness" is simply too small for what is happening, so language gives way mid-line. The poem doesn't say what the news contains, and that vagueness helps. The reader supplies the horror.
In the second stanza "touching" comes back, but now it is "touching her child," and the gentle verb turns grim. With no punctuation, the grammar slides. "Touching her child" can attach to the news before it, or it can lead into "they bury us." Either way, the poem keeps "her" unidentified. Judging by the text, she is a mother met through the news, a stranger whose loss still reaches the speaker. "They" is just as blank. It could be the people who make the headlines, the powers behind the tragedy, or simply events themselves. "Bury" works twice, once as burial under a pile of coverage and once as the real thing. "Day and night," a worn-out idiom, evokes both the rolling news cycle and grief that never takes a break. The shift from being touched to being buried is the poem's whole emotional movement in miniature.
The last stanza holds its best pun: "escape lies / in the ground." As a verb, "lies" means escape is found underground, which is an appalling consolation, since the only exit from the noise is death. But "lies" also suggests the dead lying down, and the noun "lies" hovers behind it, hinting that any promised escape may be false. "Among other people" ends the poem on a flat, almost gentle phrase. The dead are anonymous, "other people," yet they are at least in company. The poem stops without punctuation, and nothing is resolved.
Formally, the poem is spare. It has three tercets, lowercase lines, no punctuation and no rhyme. What sound-patterning it has comes from repetition. "Touching" opens two stanzas, "us" closes two lines, and "mad" is folded inside "madness." The lines are brief, scarcely more than a few syllables each, and read like headline fragments or lines on a ticker. The vocabulary is mostly plain and one-syllable: news, mad, child, ground, night. The longer words ("madness," "escape," "people") arrive at the ends of stanzas and slow the reading just as each thought lands. The rhythm is that of speech under strain, short breaths and no ornament.
That restraint is much of the poem's significance. The usual public response to disaster is sympathy at a distance, and the poem answers it with proximity. The news touches, a child is touched, and "we" are implicated and buried. By naming no event, it also refuses to belong to one occasion. It can be read against any tragedy that arrives through a screen. It offers no moral and no comfort beyond the bleak company of the grave, and in doing so it asks what language, and the phrase in its title, is really worth when the subject is a dead child.