Six short lines, no capital letters, no full stops, and yet the poem sketches a whole way of treating time. The title bends a familiar phrase. "Divide and conquer" is about control: split something up so it can be beaten. Dave Bonta keeps the dividing but swaps the conquering for "consider," a word that asks us to slow down and look. Some dictionaries suggest "consider" may once have meant "to observe the stars," which would quietly prepare the ground for the moon that arrives in the second stanza, though that origin is uncertain.
The first stanza reads like an instruction rather than a statement. "A day to write backward" has no subject and no main verb, only a day and an infinitive. What writing backward means is left open. It might be telling the day from evening to morning, or looking back on it, or unpicking it. What the poem does tell us is the result: the day "becomes / another day." The line break after "becomes" leaves the word hanging for a beat, so the change happens in the gap between lines. "Another" is slippery too. It can mean a different day or simply one more, so the writing seems both to alter the day and to extend it. The word "day" opens the stanza and closes it, as if the poem had walked a small circle and come back to the same spot, changed.
The second stanza turns from time to something you can hold. A cake is round, and so is a full moon, so the comparison is already half-made when the poem says the pieces are "as many as the moon / in fine frost." The syntax wobbles pleasantly here. Perhaps the moon is caught in countless ice crystals, each one a glint. Perhaps frost has shattered the moon into fragments. Either way the pieces multiply beyond counting, and an ordinary kitchen act becomes something nocturnal and enormous. The word "frost" also seems to nudge toward "frosting," the icing on a cake, so that a winter field and a sugared surface blur together. That is an inference, but the poem's texture invites it. A cake also implies a table and other people, and division suddenly looks like generosity rather than conquest.
Neither stanza states the link between them, and that restraint is the poem's method. The reader is left to notice that both describe cutting a whole into more than one piece. Writing divides a day into sentences, as a knife divides a cake. A day might even be a kind of cake, sliced into hours. The poem never says so. It hands over the pieces and lets us assemble them.
There is no rhyme, but sound holds the stanzas together. "Day" and "cake" share a long vowel, and "write" in the first stanza is echoed by "fine" in the second. "Cake cut" has two hard k and t sounds, crisp as a blade, while "many" and "moon" soften into an m hum. The line lengths do some quiet work as well. The cake line is the longest, running to about seven syllables, and the poem ends on "in fine frost," a three-syllable line that stops short on the clipped "st." The poem finishes on its smallest piece, as though it too had been cut.
What makes it worth reading is how much it does with so little. It offers a gentle counter-image to the aggressive idiom behind its title, suggesting that taking something apart can be a way of attending to it rather than overpowering it. It also claims a modest but appealing power for writing: a day that has been written backward does not simply repeat. A reader might turn the idea over in the next quiet moment, whether looking at a frosted window or being handed a slice of something sweet.