Dust, flies, exhaust: Dave Bonta's "In Babylon" opens like a list jotted down by someone walking too fast to finish a sentence. The first four lines have no verbs at all. Each fragment is a snapshot, and the harsh, grubby ones (*Dust. Flies.* *The sour smell of exhaust.*) are set beside gentler things: muskmelons, green shade, courtyards. The poem never says what has happened in this city. It simply lets sweetness and violence sit side by side, and the line "Blood-stained flagstones" arrives with no warning or explanation.
That placement matters. Right after the muskmelons "sliced open in the street," the blood on the stones makes us read the fruit differently. Something ordinary, a market or a meal, now carries a faint echo of injury. Judging by the imagery, this is a city under strain, but the poem withholds the cause, and that restraint is its method. The reader is a visitor without a guide, forced to read the street as it presents itself.
Then comes the poem's only question: "How does this butterfly missing half a wing / still fly so well?" The line break does quiet work. "Missing half a wing" ends the line and hangs there, so the absence registers before the wonder of "still fly so well" arrives. The butterfly is the poem's small, bright center, and the speaker's amazement is the only emotion stated outright.
The second stanza widens the lens. "A sound too deep for human hearing / makes the towers sway for a few seconds." The detail is eerie because nobody in the poem can hear what is happening. Only the buildings respond, and then they go back to "their heat-struck shimmer," a phrase that makes the skyline look like a mirage, solid and unreliable at once. The car alarms that "start up all over the city" are a small irony. Machines register the disturbance that people cannot, and their panic is automatic and noisy while the cause stays unnamed. The title adds weight here. Babylon has long stood for a great city of towers and empire, and a name that old makes the swaying skyline feel like a warning about how impermanent grand things are.
Against all this, the closing lines return to the butterfly: "The butterfly doesn't miss / a drunken beat." The phrase twists the idiom "doesn't miss a beat." The word *miss* also picks up the earlier "missing half a wing," so the pun carries the damaged body into the language itself. And "drunken" changes the picture. This is no graceful glide. The butterfly lurches and wobbles, but it keeps its rhythm. The poem's idea of survival is not heroic or tidy. Life goes on in a lopsided, stumbling way, and that is enough.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, and the poem is in free verse, but the two stanzas are matched at six lines each, and each ends on the butterfly, first as a question and then as something close to an answer. The rhythm moves from clipped to flowing. The early fragments are short and heavy, with stressed single syllables, and "Dust. Flies." lands like two dull thuds. Sound shapes mood as well. The hissing *s* of "sour smell" and "sliced open in the street" feels abrasive, while "pools of green shade" has soft, rounded vowels that slow the line and cool it. In the second stanza the longer lines ("before returning to their heat-struck shimmer") sway and settle like the towers they describe. The last line is short again, and its three syllables, "a drunken beat," stagger to a stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts a small image. It gives no argument about war, resilience, or the fragility of cities. It gives an insect with half a wing and lets us feel the contrast with the swaying towers: the huge structures wobble and recover, and the tiny creature keeps going. The question in the first stanza is never formally answered, and it doesn't need to be. The way the butterfly goes on flying is the answer.