The grand word comes first: "this day of the sword." It sounds like something from scripture or a chronicle, a day when history is decided. Then comes the speaker's response: "I look after my knives." The scale drops at once, from the sword, which belongs to armies and prophecy, to knives, which belong to kitchens, boats and workbenches. The poem's whole attitude is in that gap. While something enormous goes on, or is expected, the speaker takes care of the small tools of an ordinary life. Whether that is stubborn practicality or quiet defiance, the poem never says.
The title adds to the tension. "Standard issue" is the language of uniforms and equipment, the kit handed out to everyone alike. Dave Bonta puts it in the plural, "issues", and the word picks up its other meaning: problems. Read this way, the poem is a short inventory of everyday troubles. There is no money, a debt that cannot be paid, a poor run of luck, and an attitude to hold through it all.
The middle of the poem is where the images start to shift. The speaker has "not a penny / to pay the sea." The idea of paying the sea is strange. The sea is not a shopkeeper or a landlord, yet here it is treated as a creditor or a toll-keeper. The poem doesn't explain this, and the oddness is deliberate. Poverty here is not just an empty pocket but a debt to something vast and indifferent. Then the sea becomes "an ungrateful lover / near poverty." The grammar leaves it open who is ungrateful and who is near poverty. It could be the sea, the speaker, or both, locked in a relationship where neither gives the other what is owed. The word "near" is worth noticing, because it suggests being on the edge of poverty rather than fully in it, a precarious position rather than a ruined one.
The last couplet turns the focus onto attitude: the lover "who is scornful about / playing a bad hand." The metaphor shifts again, from sea to card table, and the poem lands on a stock phrase. The shift matters because the phrase is so worn. "Playing a bad hand" is something people say with a shrug, and the poem ends on that shrug. The scorn is aimed at self-pity, at the idea that bad luck deserves a performance. The word "hand" may also quietly echo the knives from the opening, since hands are what hold blades, though that link is an inference rather than something the poem states.
The form follows the same restraint. There are four couplets, with short lines of roughly four to seven syllables and no rhyme. The sound patterning is subtler. The "s" of "sword," "sea" and "scornful" runs through the poem like a hiss, and the "p" sounds of "penny," "pay," "poverty" and "playing" bunch together around the theme of money and risk. There is no punctuation, so the poem reads as one long sentence that keeps sliding sideways. "I" appears once, in line two, and after that the syntax loosens. "Having not a penny" has no clear subject, and "who is scornful" attaches to whatever came before it. Each clause hangs from the previous one like a link in a chain, and the effect is of a mind moving from image to image. The line breaks help. "Scornful about" ends on a preposition and leaves the reader suspended until "playing a bad hand" completes it.
The poem packs four separate image-worlds into eight short lines: blades, the sea, a love affair and a card game. None of them is developed, and none needs to be. They work like quick glances at the same situation from different angles, and what they share is a tone of dry composure. The speaker does not complain or bargain. The poem's central idea is that dignity in hard times can consist of small, practical acts and a refusal to be dramatic.
That is what makes the poem worth reading closely. It is a small piece with a large hinge, the contrast between sword and knives, and a title that turns a military phrase into a joke about troubles. It shows how little a poem needs to suggest a whole stance toward life: a few plain words, a couple of odd images, and an ending that declines to make a speech.