A stone has no business growing a mouth, and that is where Dave Bonta's "Lucky" begins. The opening line sets an impossible, slightly comic event in plain words: "the stone grew a mouth." The verb matters. The mouth is not carved or given. It grows, slowly, the way moss or a crack or a hollow might, as if the stone's need had shaped its body. By the final line, that quiet image has become a claim about love: being loved is a strange piece of luck, and it has little to do with deserving.
The first stanza is built on a careful distinction: the mouth is "for the mist / not for the haze." The two words are close but not the same. Mist is made of actual water, cool and touchable, something that lands on a surface and can be drunk or kissed. Haze, judging by how we use the word, is vaguer, a general blurring of the air that belongs to no one in particular. The stone, then, is choosing. Its hunger is specific. The line break after "for the mist" gives that choice a small beat of emphasis before the second half of the sentence withdraws the alternative. It is a tidy picture of how love differs from a general mood: it wants one particular thing.
The second stanza turns on a pun that is easy to miss. "But mistress enough" has the word "mist" inside it. The mist the stone grew a mouth for becomes, in sound and spelling, a mistress, a beloved and perhaps a presiding lady of the place. "Enough" adds a note of modesty. The mist is not grand, only just sufficient, and it is a mistress anyway. "Mistress" also carries a hint of the unofficial, of a love that does not sit in a respectable arrangement. That is echoed in the phrase "that irregular ground." Literally, the ground is uneven, the broken terrain where a stone might sit and mist might gather. Figuratively, the footing of this relationship is unorthodox too. The poem never explains this double meaning, which is partly why it works. The landscape and the love story share the same words.
The last stanza steps back from the scene and comments on it: "it is a strange blockhead luck / to be loved." Here the stone becomes the joke, and the joke is affectionate. A "blockhead" is a fool, but it is also, literally, a head made of block. A stone is the ultimate blockhead, solid, dull, unable to earn anything. The phrase "blockhead luck" recalls everyday expressions like "dumb luck," where good fortune lands on someone who did nothing to bring it about. Yet the speaker does not sneer. The word "strange" admits wonder, and the poem leaves open whether the speaker is the stone, someone who feels like a stone, or an observer who is simply moved by it.
The sound of the poem supports this humility. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and everything is in lowercase, so the poem seems to speak in a low voice. Still, small echoes tie it together: "mouth," "mist," and "mistress" all lean on the same soft m; "enough" and "luck" share a blunt vowel; and the hard k and g sounds in "irregular ground" and "blockhead luck" rattle like pebbles. The rhythm is free, but it tightens at the end. "Strange blockhead luck" piles up heavy syllables in a row, slowing the line to the weight of the thing it describes. Then "to be loved" drops to three light words, ending on a gentle "loved," as if the stone had finally been given the water it wanted.
What makes "Lucky" worth reading is how much it does with so little. In seven short lines it gives us personification, a hidden pun, a pair of carefully chosen weather words, and a turn from description to feeling. Most poems about love flatter the beloved or the lover. This one gives the credit to chance and to the mist that happened to drift by, and it lets a lump of rock stand for the rest of us, who are not much more deserving. The title is a single word, and by the end it reads as both a plain fact and a quiet, grateful joke.