Strategy is usually imagined as cool, rational planning, and Dave Bonta's "Strategic" lets that calm surface slip until something uglier shows underneath. In eight short lines, the poem moves from a polite invitation to wait, through a quiet act of transformation, to two blunt questions about who pays when plans are carried out. Its central idea is that the language of decision-making can disguise violence as procedure, and that the people who suffer are rarely the people deciding.
The opening, "wait with us between good / and bad propositions", sounds like a committee chair asking for patience. "Propositions" is a cold, businesslike word, and it makes moral choices sound like items on an agenda. The line break does something clever too. It leaves "good" stranded at the end of the first line, so the reader hangs for a moment in the very gap the sentence describes. "Us" matters as well. The speaker pulls the reader into a group before we know what the group intends, and we are made to wait alongside whoever is in charge.
The second stanza is the hinge. "Turning anger into ash / and a wound into a green light" has the sound of alchemy, and the two halves look parallel, but they pull in opposite directions. Turning anger into ash means burning feeling out, leaving something dead and grey. Turning a wound into a green light is darker. A green light means go, permission, and green is also the colour of healing, so the image holds two meanings at once. The injury is no longer something to recover from. It has become a signal to proceed. The poem seems to suggest that grievance can be converted into justification, though it never says so outright. Every image in the stanza is also a change of state, and the repeated "turning" gives the transformation a smooth, practised feel, as though it were routine.
Then the tone breaks. "do we open every hole" is a single line standing alone, and it is the strangest in the poem. "Hole" is plain and physical, nothing like "propositions". It echoes "wound" from the stanza before, since a wound is a hole in a body, and it can suggest trenches, graves or bullet holes, though the poem lets the reader choose. "Open" sounds like an act of access, as if every opening were an opportunity, and the question asks whether strategy means pushing through all of them.
The final line is the sharpest: "shall the poor have war again". The grammar of "shall the poor have…" belongs to the language of giving, as though war were a ration or a benefit to be granted. Read that way, it is bitterly ironic, because it turns suffering into an entitlement. The word "again" adds a sense of repetition, of a cycle that the earlier, tidy vocabulary of strategy has been hiding. Judging by the text alone, the poor here are the ones who will fight and bear the loss, while the "us" of the opening is positioned somewhere safer, doing the deciding.
The poem's form suits that unsettling tone. There is no rhyme and there are no capital letters, and the two questions have no question marks. That absence makes them sound flat and deadpan, as if they were being read aloud in a meeting where nobody expects an answer. The poem is built from short, enjambed lines, with stanzas that shrink from two lines to one, so it seems to tighten toward its final question. Sound does some quiet work as well. The w of "wait," "with," "wound" and "war" runs through the poem like a thread, linking the polite opening to the violent ending. The vowels of "anger," "ash" and "again" also echo each other, so the language keeps circling back on itself, much like the cycle of war it describes.
The poem matters because it is compact and refuses to be comfortable. It makes no speech about war. It shows how easily abstract words like "strategic" and "propositions" can sit beside a wound or a hole without disturbing anyone, and it leaves the reader, who has been told to "wait with us," to notice the unease. By the end, waiting no longer looks neutral. It looks like a kind of complicity.