Three lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a whole fable folded inside them. Dave Bonta's "Men in cloaks" begins with a title that promises concealment and then, in its first line, takes the cloaks away: the men are "undressed by order of the crow people." What follows reads like a verdict, a charge and a symptom, in that order. The punishment comes first, then the crime ("an ill usage of land they neither heard nor saw"), and last the sickness that seems to have grown from it ("their sick kissing unmissing the plague"). The poem runs backwards, from consequence to cause to contagion, the way a story arrives when you only catch the end of it.
The most striking choice is who holds the power. Humans are judged by "crow people," a phrase that makes the birds a governing body. Crows are scavengers, creatures that arrive after death, so a tribunal of crows suggests that the land's own watchers have turned into judges. "By order of" borrows the cold language of officialdom, which makes the stripping sound like procedure rather than rage. The cloaks suggest rank, secrecy or protection (the poem doesn't say which), and removing them leaves the men exposed to everything they tried to stand apart from.
The second line holds the poem's moral centre. "Ill usage" has an old-fashioned, almost legal sound, as if the land were a servant or a borrowed object that had been mistreated. The men's offence is less cruelty than inattention: the land is something they "neither heard nor saw." Notice that the verbs are about perception, not action. You might expect to see land, but the poem asks you to hear it too, which hints that land speaks and that ignoring it is itself a kind of violence. The pronoun "they" is also slippery. It could refer to the cloaked men, or to the crow people, or to anyone who has treated the earth as scenery. That vagueness widens the accusation.
The last line is where the language gets most inventive. "Sick kissing unmissing the plague" packs its sounds tightly: "sick," "kissing" and "unmissing" chime off each other, and "kissing" and "unmissing" almost rhyme, which gives the line a sticky, repetitive quality that suits contagion. "Unmissing" is a coinage, and it can be read several ways. It might mean the plague is no longer absent, that it has been summoned back. It might mean the kisses never miss their target, delivering infection with perfect aim. It might even mean not longing for the plague, in which case the men are indifferent to the thing they spread. The word also echoes "undressed" from the first line, so the poem is bracketed by un- words, each one undoing something (clothes, absence). Kissing is the most intimate way to pass on disease, and the poem turns tenderness into transmission.
Structurally, the poem consists of three single-line stanzas, each a fragment. None has a main verb in the ordinary sense: "undressed," "an ill usage," "their sick kissing" all hang in the air without a sentence to complete them. The effect is of an accusation or an inscription more than a narrative. There is no rhyme at the line ends and no steady meter. The lines are uneven, with the middle one stretching longest, as if the charge against the men takes more breath than the punishment or the illness. White space between the lines lets each image settle before the next arrives.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it asks the reader to supply. It gives no setting, no names, and no explanation of why crows hold authority, so you have to build the world yourself. It also joins three ideas that rarely sit together: public humiliation, environmental neglect and disease. The implied argument is that a failure to listen to the land does not stay abstract and eventually shows up in the body. In so few words, the poem makes an old warning sound strange and new.