Six oranges sit on a grave, and a small child wants to play with them. That slightly comic collision drives Dave Bonta's "Import/Export," a poem that begins in a cemetery and ends up carrying the weight of a whole region's history without ever raising its voice.
The opening reads like a camera slowly pulling back. First comes the fruit, then "the short grass," then the grave, then the dead man's trade, and finally his birthplace, Aleppo. Each line widens the frame. The title's slash works the same way, holding two directions at once: goods going out and goods coming in. The poem never says where the cemetery is, but "born in Aleppo" suggests a man who travelled and was buried far from where he started. The oranges fit this. They are exactly what such a company might ship, and now they are offerings left behind.
Then a toddler arrives, "straining against / his mother's grip," and shouts "Ball!" For him the oranges are simply round things to kick about. The poem answers with two questions that the speaker cannot answer: "How to explain / the Silk / Road, the souk, / the once-unassailable / hospitality of merchants?" The line breaks do quiet work here. "Silk" is left alone at the end of its line before "Road" arrives, so the phrase stretches out like the route it names. "Once-unassailable" carries the grief. "Unassailable" is a military word, a fortress word, and applying it to hospitality makes kindness sound like a stronghold. The word "once" admits the stronghold has been breached.
The second question swerves: "How to explain torture, / a feast of agonies called / the magic carpet?" The vocabulary of generosity ("feast") is bent toward horror, and a fairy-tale name is stuck on something monstrous. The poem does not say what the phrase refers to, and I would not guess. The effect is of a charming label clamped onto cruelty. A reader today will probably hear modern Syria's suffering behind this, though that is an inference, since the poem never names a war. What the poem does show is the gap between a child's vocabulary and an adult's knowledge, and how unbridgeable it feels.
At this point the poem lets the natural world interrupt: "A cricket plays his hit single." The joke deflates the tension, but it also builds a rhyme of idea. The cricket has one repeated note, and so does the toddler: "Ball. Ball." Neither has a second verse. The short, blunt sentences land like beats of that tune. Then comes "Such longing!", with its exclamation mark echoing "Ball!" The speaker borrows the child's way of speaking, and the line stays open. It could be the boy's longing for the fruit, or the speaker's for a vanished world, or the longing of a man buried far from home. The poem doesn't choose.
The ending hands the last word to someone else: "In Syria, they say / a narrow spot can contain / a thousand friends." Instead of lecturing the child, the speaker offers a proverb, much as a good host would offer a cup of something rather than an argument. The anonymous "they" gives the closing voice to the culture itself. The saying also fits the scene. A grave is about the narrowest spot there is, and yet around it have gathered a dead merchant, a mother, a boy, a cricket, a speaker and six oranges. The proverb may be the poem's own "import," a small piece of Syrian wisdom carried into a quiet graveyard. It also sits uneasily beside the word "torture" just above it, because the poem lets generosity and cruelty stand in the same place without reconciling them.
The poem is formally plain: free verse, no rhyme, short lines, a conversational pace that stops and starts like someone thinking aloud. That plainness is part of its force. It suggests that history does not arrive with fanfare. It turns up in ordinary moments, in a toddler's demand and a cricket's chirp, and the best we can do is to pass on what is worth keeping, such as the idea that even a narrow place can hold a thousand friends.