Mike Stone's "Closure" is made of three stanzas and five words, and almost everything in it is repeated. The title promises an ending, the neat emotional full stop that the word usually suggests. The poem then gives us weather and a person who won't stay gone: "Fog." "You again." "Fog again."
On the surface, a speaker finds the same fog and the same "you" returning. The poem never says who "you" is, and that silence is deliberate. Judging by the title, it is reasonable to read "you" as someone the speaker has tried to put behind them, but the text keeps the identity blank. The tone of "You again" is blank too. It could be exasperated, as if a door has been opened onto an unwelcome visitor. It could be weary, or even faintly tender. The central idea seems to be that closure is not an event you complete but a state you keep failing to reach. What we try to finish keeps coming back, and memory is not a filing cabinet but a fog that rolls in without asking.
The construction supports that idea closely. There is not a single verb in the poem. Nothing happens, nothing is done, and no one moves. The speaker is stuck in a state rather than an action, and the grammar enacts it. The stanzas also form a small mirror. A single word opens the poem, and then two near-identical lines follow: "You again" and "Fog again." Because they share a shape, "you" and "fog" are placed in the same slot, and the syntax quietly equates them. The person becomes as shapeless, grey and unavoidable as the weather. The "you" is also sandwiched between two fogs, as if it surfaces for a moment and is swallowed again.
There is no conventional rhyme, but repetition does the work rhyme usually does. "Again" appears twice at the ends of lines, so the poem rhymes a word with itself. That is the sound of a loop, a chime that never moves to a new note. Read aloud, the lines are short and flat, with the stress falling heavily on "Fog" and landing again on "gain" in each repeated phrase. The full stops matter too. Each one lands like a door shutting, a small formal closure on the page, while the meaning keeps leaking out under the door. The poem ends on "again," a word that points forward to a next time, so the last thing we hear is the promise of another repetition.
The imagery is almost absent, and that is what makes it work. Stone gives no description of the fog, no colour, no street, no lamp-post. There is only the word, and the reader supplies the grey. That is itself a kind of fogging: the poem withholds detail, so we also cannot see clearly. There is a pun in the title as well. "Closure" is the word we use for emotional endings, but fog is something that closes in, shrinking the world to a few feet of visibility. The poem lets both meanings sit in one word, and the second quietly undermines the first.
The white space between the stanzas does a lot of the remaining work. Each gap is a pause in which something might change, and each time the same thing returns. The silences are as important as the words, and they leave room for whatever the reader fears might come back.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. It takes a word from everyday self-help vocabulary, one that promises tidy endings, and tests it against five words of evidence. The result is not bitter or melodramatic. It is quiet and slightly wry, which is perhaps why it feels true. Anyone who has believed a chapter was over, only to meet its ghost on an ordinary morning, will recognise the sinking, half-amused "You again." The poem suggests that closure may be less a place we arrive at than a name we give to hoping the fog will lift.