Few words belong so firmly to the present as "influencer," and few poems seem less interested in the thing the word usually describes. Dave Bonta's seven lines contain no followers, screens or products. They offer a season, a ship, a road and a singing merchant. The title is a provocation: if you want to know what real influence looks like, the poem suggests, look at someone who simply sets out, and notice how the world responds.
The first stanza is a small argument. "In summer's mad wisdom / setting sail is better / than a bad birth." The opening phrase is an oxymoron, and it sets the poem's temperature. Summer is mad, with its heat and restlessness and urge to leave, but its madness turns out to be wise. What follows is an odd comparison. Birth is something done to us, an arrival we never chose, while setting sail is a departure we choose. The word "bad" makes the contrast sharper, as if a poor start in life can be answered by deliberately casting off. There is also a sound-pun underneath. "Birth" sits beside "sail," and the ear catches "berth," the place a ship is moored. A bad berth is exactly what you leave behind. This is my inference from the sounds, not something the poem states, but the nautical setting makes it hard to ignore.
The poem's music is quiet but deliberate. There is no end rhyme, yet "mad" in the first line and "bad" in the third chime across the stanza and bind the opening and closing phrases together. The rhythm of "setting sail is better" is a gentle rocking, stress then slack, stress then slack, like a hull on swell. Then the stanza ends on the clipped, heavy "bad birth," which lands like a bump against the dock. The lines are short, mostly five or six syllables, and the absence of punctuation lets the thought drift from one line to the next without a full stop.
The second stanza begins with "and," as though we have joined a sentence already underway. Then comes an instruction, "see how this road / takes notice of you." The grammar flips the usual arrangement. We expect the traveller to notice the road, to read its bends and weather. Here the road is the attentive one, and the person on it is the one being observed. Influence runs the other way too. By choosing to go, you become visible to the landscape, which rearranges itself around you. It is a lovely reversal, and it gives the title a second meaning. The influencer may be the road, or summer, or the impulse to sail, rather than the person we usually mean. The word itself comes from the Latin for "flowing in," and it first described the supposed pouring of the stars' power into human lives. That older, watery sense fits a poem full of sails.
The last image is the most puzzling and the most memorable: "a Zen merchant singing / for the company." A Zen merchant is a small paradox, since Zen suggests detachment and a merchant suggests trade. Yet this figure does not sell. He sings. The final phrase can be read two ways. "Company" may mean companionship, so he sings to keep fellowship on the road. But in the world of merchants it also suggests a firm or a trading house, which would make the song a kind of branding. The poem lets both meanings stand. It is gently teasing the modern idea of influence, in which charm and commerce are tangled together, while holding out something freer, a person who performs because singing is what travelling sounds like. The lack of a closing full stop, and the trailing rhythm of "com-pa-ny," leave the song unfinished.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It takes a worn-out buzzword and rinses it through older ideas: seasons, voyages, the road as a living presence. It never explains itself, so each reader has to decide who the influencer really is, and the answer may well be you, once you set sail.