A valediction is a farewell speech, so a reader might expect grief and a lingering hand on the door. Dave Bonta's poem offers something quieter: a whisper, some green leaves, and an instruction the speaker gives himself. Standing in the light of "August's last morning," he tells himself to remember it. He does this less like a mourner than like someone packing supplies before a long journey. The central idea is that memory is a deliberate act, and that what we store now will be what we live on when the dark months arrive.
The poem's cleverest move is its comparison. The present moment must be remembered "the way I remember sailboats / rocking at anchor." So the new memory is filed beside older ones, and we watch the archive being built. The items are not grand occasions. They are "a row of multicoloured beach huts / against the north Atlantic," "the eerie pre-dawn cries / of Manx shearwaters / returning to their cliffs," "the smell of a well- / loved pub." The senses are covered one by one: sight in the leaves and huts, sound in the birds, smell in the pub. The list ends with a person rather than a sense: "sitting across the table / from a life partner." The phrase is flat, almost bureaucratic, and that plainness is what moves us. There is no gushing, only the fact of someone sitting opposite, which the poem treats as the most precious thing on the list.
The form suits this modesty. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short, roughly a breath long, so the poem sounds like speech held low. Apart from one apostrophe there is no punctuation, so the thoughts run on in one hushed stream. Most stanzas are couplets, with a single tercet for the shearwaters, as if their cries needed an extra line to echo. The first line uses a lowercase "i," while the later "I" is capitalised. Whether or not it is deliberate, it can read as a small voice steadying as it goes. The line breaks also do real work. "Well- / loved" splits a word across the gap, so "loved" arrives on its own line beside "pub." It feels like memory itself, which keeps fragments rather than wholes. Sound is gently patterned too: "gazing at green leaves" chimes on its g and long e, and "returning" and "eerie" echo the birds' calls.
The ending turns the poem around. After "commit this too / to memory and then," a stanza break leaves the reader hanging on "and then" before the final request: "remember winter's promise / of a ladder to the moon." Everything so far has been something seen, heard or smelled. The ladder is the one image that is not an ordinary object, and the poem does not explain it. Judging by the imagery, it might suggest long, clear winter nights, but the line stays open. What matters is the word "promise." Winter is not a threat here. Remembering is not only looking back but also gathering something to carry forward, so a farewell to summer ends as a quiet greeting to the cold season.
The shearwaters carry some of this. They are birds "returning" in the dark before dawn, and the word sits against the poem's title, which is about leaving. Departure and return are folded into one image, and we are reminded that endings in nature are rarely final.
The poem is significant because it makes so much from so little. It takes the large subject of time passing and shrinks it to the scale of one morning, a few seaside sights and a table for two. In doing so it suggests that attention is a kind of love, and that the things worth keeping are rarely dramatic. The poem also enacts what it describes. By listing its memories, it preserves them, and the repeated "remember" and "commit" seem to reach past the speaker to the reader. We finish having been handed a small inheritance of images and told to look after it.