Six short lines, three couplets, and nobody to blame but the speaker. Dave Bonta's "Complicit" is about hearing a cry and not answering it, and then, which is worse, about going out to find a way of feeling fine about that. The poem names no war, place or date, so everything it knows has to come from its handful of words.
The first line is a greeting: "greetings o gun of a martyr". The old-fashioned "o" belongs to odes and prayers, and here it is aimed at a weapon. The phrase "gun of a martyr" packs two opposed ideas together. A martyr is someone who dies for a belief and is honoured for it, while a gun is something that kills. The poem doesn't say which meaning wins, and the politeness of "greetings" makes the address stranger still. It sounds like a nod to a figure on the doorstep, half respect and half dread. The hard g of "greetings" and "gun" gives the line a clipped, almost mechanical click.
Next comes the sound the speaker can't ignore: "I hear each reed cry out." Reeds are hollow, marsh-dwelling and easily bent, so they are a natural image of fragility, and they make noise when the wind goes through them. They also have the same tube shape as a gun barrel, though that link is my reading rather than something the poem states. Nobody is said to be crying, so the landscape itself seems to speak. The word "each" matters because it makes the cry total. Not one reed is left out, and the speaker has no excuse of not having heard.
The line break then does the poem's most important work. After "cry out" the next line begins, "and I am silent / as a house in war." Silence arrives in the white space, exactly where an answer should be. The simile turns the speaker into a building, something that can't speak and can only stand. A house in war could be shuttered and dark with people hiding inside, or it could be empty and waiting to be hit. The first kind of silence is survival and the second is abandonment. The simile holds both, and the title tells us which verdict to reach. It is also worth hearing how "out" and "house" share a vowel across the stanza break. The cry and the silence rhyme faintly, as if the silence were the cry muffled.
The ending is the cleverest part. "I hunt for a better moon / to lie to." The verb "hunt" belongs to the world of guns, so the speaker, who claims to be a passive house, ends up with a hunter's vocabulary after all. The quarry is the moon, which poetry has long treated as the patient listener of lonely people. The speaker wants a better one, meaning a more forgiving or more believing one. Then comes "to lie to", which plays on two meanings of "lie", to lie down and to tell untruths. The grammar settles on falsehood, and the poem ends on a small, unstressed preposition, as though even the confession can't be said loudly. Judging by this ending, the speaker isn't looking for someone to tell the truth to. He is looking for an audience that can be fooled, perhaps himself. It is possible, too, that the poem itself, a moonlit-sounding lyric, is part of the lie, though the text only hints at that.
The form supports all this. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme, apart from the soft *r* endings of "martyr", "war" and "better". The poem sounds like a murmur rather than a speech. The lines also shrink, from eight syllables in the first line to just three in the last. The poem narrows as the speaker retreats, until almost nothing is left to say.
What makes "Complicit" worth reading is how much it refuses. It doesn't cast the speaker as a martyr or a gunman, and it doesn't offer a rousing protest. Its speaker is a bystander who notices the cries, goes quiet and then reaches for a comfortable story. Because no particular conflict is named, the poem can describe any gap between hearing and acting. It is also quietly honest about dishonesty, since the speaker admits the lie while still looking for the moon to tell it to. A reader finishing it may well wonder which moon they have picked out for themselves.