Most of us treat darkness as a problem to be solved: switch on a lamp, lift a phone, find the way. Dave Bonta's "Moonwalker" goes the other direction. It begins with someone choosing to walk in the dark, and calls the choice a favor. "To favor my eyes" is a gently odd phrase. We usually favor a sore knee or a bad ankle, meaning we go easy on it. Applied to eyes, the verb suggests they are tired, perhaps from too much glare, and that the speaker's remedy is less light rather than more looking. That is an inference from the wording, but the wording carries it well.
The poem is only six short lines in three couplets, and its grammar is as spare as its length. Nothing in it is a full sentence. "Walking in the dark" is a participial phrase with no stated subject, "nothing but the garden to turn to" has no verb of its own, and "some second sun / making me see" hangs off the previous line like a fruit on a branch. There is no punctuation and no capital letter, so the poem never formally begins or ends. That fits its subject. A person walking at night feels their way from one half-visible thing to the next, and the syntax does the same, picking up each new thought as it arrives.
The second couplet is the most open to interpretation. "Nothing but the garden to turn to" can sound like a limitation: no company, no destination, only a small cultivated patch. It can just as easily sound like enough. The phrase "turn to" is also doubled with the earlier "to favor," so the poem's two infinitives are lined up like two small decisions. Ending a line on the dangling preposition "to" leaves the gesture unfinished, as though the speaker has turned but not yet arrived. A garden is also a telling place to put a night walker. It is tamed, familiar ground, so whatever happens there is a discovery within the ordinary, not an adventure in the wild.
Then comes the surprise. The final couplet never names the moon, but the title has already done it. "Moonwalker" can't help recalling astronauts, yet the poem turns that image around: the walker is not on the moon but under it, in a garden, with the moon doing the work overhead. The phrase "some second sun" is wonderfully casual. The word "some" makes it sound like a guess, as if the speaker can't be bothered with the exact name for the thing, or is still adjusting to it. There is real accuracy under the looseness, too, since the moon shines only by reflecting the sun. Calling it a second sun is both a small error and a small truth. It gives a borrowed, softened light, one that helps the eyes without hurting them.
The sound of the last two lines supports this. "Some second sun / making me see" is thick with soft s and m sounds, a hush of consonants after the harder "dark," "garden," and "turn" that came before. The language itself seems to relax as the light arrives.
The last phrase, "making me see," is the poem's quiet hinge. The moon doesn't simply let the speaker see; it makes them, as if sight were something the light does to you. And "see" in English slides easily from looking to understanding. After the poem has argued that the way to help the eyes is to rest them in darkness, it ends by suggesting that darkness, once it admits a little moonlight, sharpens perception rather than dulling it. The eyes recover, and so, perhaps, does the mind.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it trusts a small scene. It makes no speech about nature or modern life, though it faintly invites one. It offers a walk, a garden, a pale light and one precise verb, and lets the reader supply the rest. The poem also asks for the same attention it describes. Read quickly, it is almost nothing. Read slowly, in a dim room if you like, its few words begin to stand out one by one.