Eleven short lines, one dash and not a single full stop: Jake Newland's "Topical" sounds almost like a lullaby, and that softness is what makes it unsettling. A voice tells a crowd to calm down, claims that "better men" have freed "us" from fear, and then describes homes disappearing and distant islands about to be claimed. The last two lines reverse the whole mood. The central idea seems to be that security won at someone else's expense leaves the winners empty too. The poem names no place, event or side, so it is best read as a pattern rather than a report. The title "Topical" promises current affairs, but the poem declines to say which. Either that is a dry joke, or it invites readers to fit whatever news they like. "Topical" can also mean a treatment applied to the surface, and that suits the "solemn sighs" in the poem, which soothe without healing anything.
The opening image is "Narrow teeth of shouting mouths." People are reduced to teeth, the part of a mouth that bites, and "narrow" suggests both a cramped shape and a cramped mind. The speaker's next words, "Rest your weary hearts," sound kind, but they come straight after that insult. The line is an order disguised as comfort. Its vowel also echoes "fear" two lines later, as if the weariness and the fear were one feeling.
The speaker's account of freedom is carefully gentle: "The solemn sighs / Of better men / Have set us free from fear." The line breaks slow the sentence down so that it sounds like a ceremony. "Better" is simply asserted, never shown, and the means of liberation are sighs, not deeds. Whatever was actually done has been smoothed into grave, passive language. The alliterating "free from fear" sounds like a slogan, and the dash that follows it is the poem's only punctuation. It works as a hinge. Before it the voice comforts, and after it the voice reports, though its calm hardly changes.
"Your homes all marched away" is the poem's strangest image. Homes cannot march, so they are turned into a column of soldiers or refugees, and the sentence never says who made them leave. The grammar then loosens further. "Stirring with the tides" can belong to the homes that drift off or to the "far flung archipelagos" that follow, and the line floats between the two like something carried on water. "Archipelagos" is the longest word in the poem, five syllables, and it stretches its line the way an island chain stretches across a sea. Scattered islands also quietly echo scattered people.
The most important change comes in the pronouns. "Your homes" become "our homelands," and the swap is more than a change of owner. A home is intimate, while a homeland is a political idea, so the speaker trades something lived in for something claimed. The word "soon" makes the claim sound like a matter of time and not of right.
Then comes the turn. "Once were we strangers" inverts normal word order, which gives it the ring of an old chronicle or fable. "Now we live alone" lands with no full stop, so the thought hangs there unfinished. The two lines are almost mirror images, with "once" set against "now" and "strangers" against "alone," like a ledger of loss and gain. Strangers at least implies other people nearby. Being alone implies that the "you" has gone, and with it the point of having homelands at all.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme. Its lines are mostly four to seven syllables, and the pace is hushed and even. Because the lines are so spare, each word carries weight, and the closing lines hit harder for the quiet before them.
The poem is worth studying because it never raises its voice. It lets the speaker's tone incriminate him: the comforting commands, the euphemisms, the pronoun that quietly grabs what it was just describing as someone else's. It also leaves readers to decide who "we" are and whether they would be willing to join them.