Eight short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "The other half" looks like a note scribbled in a hurry. Yet it makes a whole argument about who a city belongs to and what keeps it quiet.
It opens by drawing a line. "We and the businessmen / we are not the same" puts two groups side by side, as if in a ledger, and then denies that they add up. The poem never says who "we" are. Judging by the title, though, "we" seem to be the other half, the part of the city that isn't counted when the businessmen do the counting. That is an inference, since the poem names no place, date or cause. But the missing details are part of its method. The reader has to decide who is standing on which side of the line.
The second couplet complicates things. "No sober citizens / honor this city" can be read as a flat statement: the respectable, serious people do not honor the place they live in. The missing punctuation allows other readings, such as honor being withheld from them. Either way, "sober" is a clever word to choose. It suggests sober suits and sober faces, and also the clear head of someone who hasn't been drinking. Here sobriety looks less like wisdom than like a dull, comfortable complacency, and the "we" seem to be the unrespectable ones.
In the third couplet the language swells. "This war this plague / this enemy among us" repeats "this" like a pointing finger, and without commas the three nouns run together as though they were one catastrophe. War and plague are old, almost biblical disasters, but the poem puts them in the present tense, right in front of us. The pronoun then shifts. Until now it has been "we" against "the businessmen"; now the enemy is "among us," inside the group that thought it was the victim. The poem doesn't say whether this enemy is the businessmen, the military or something in ourselves, and the uncertainty is unsettling.
The last couplet is the strangest and the best. The line "the infinite ink of a military" is the longest in the poem, and its length enacts the word "infinite." The short *i* sounds in "infinite," "ink" and "military" pile up so that the phrase seems to spread across the page. Ink can mean many things here: budgets and contracts, orders and treaties, headlines, the red ink of debt. It is also a dark liquid that blots out whatever it touches. Then comes the shortest line of all, "as dear as sleep." "Dear" means both beloved and costly, so the military is cherished and expensive at once. Sleep is comfort, but also unconsciousness. The suggestion is that we prize our military because it lets us stop thinking, and that we pay heavily for the privilege.
The ending is quiet. After the pointing and piling-up of the third couplet, the poem finishes on a hush that sounds almost like a lullaby. It lowers its own voice in the way it accuses the city of being lulled.
Formally, the poem is four unrhymed couplets in uneven, speech-like lines of four to six syllables, until the long line near the end. The lack of rhyme keeps it from sounding neat or settled. The couplets feel like pairs of statements set against each other: us and them, citizens and city, enemy and us, ink and sleep. Plain words such as "same," "war," "plague" and "sleep" carry nearly all the weight, and there are almost no adjectives besides "sober" and "infinite," which are the two words that turn out to be ironic or excessive.
The poem matters because it fits a political argument into the space of a breath without becoming a slogan. It names no villain and gives no instructions. Instead it makes the reader do what the sleeping city won't, which is to ask who "we" are, who the enemy is, and what the ink is paying for.