Four short lines, and already the reader has met a beggar, a king, a moon and a crowd of princesses. Dave Bonta's "Insomnia" sounds like the opening of a fairy tale that never gets going, and that suits its subject: a night when sleep refuses to arrive and the mind, with nothing better to do, wanders off into stories.
The central idea sits in the word "hard". Sleep "was hard as a beggar's moon, / hard as joy to a king." The word works in two ways at once. It means difficult, as in hard to get, but it also means solid and unyielding, like a coin or a stone you press against without getting in. Both comparisons describe something visible but out of reach. Judging by the imagery, the beggar's moon is round and silver like a coin, something he can look at and never spend. The second comparison is a small paradox: a king can command almost anything, yet joy is not on the list. By choosing figures from opposite ends of the social ladder, the poem suggests that insomnia is a great leveller. Neither poverty nor power can buy sleep, and it comes only as a gift.
The colon after "king" promises an explanation, as if the next line will show what that hardness looks like. What follows is "all night rising to leave", and the grammar leaves open who is doing the rising. It could be the speaker, getting out of bed again and again. It could be sleep itself, behaving like a guest who never settles. It could also be the moon, which rises and travels "all night" and links back to the beggar's moon of the first line. The poem never chooses, and the ambiguity is part of its effect, since in a sleepless night the boundaries between self, bed and sky begin to blur. There is a quiet irony too, because rising and leaving belong to morning, and here the night just goes on.
The last line, "counting princesses", is the poem's one turn toward humour. Everyone knows the old remedy of counting sheep, and Bonta swaps the dull animals for something more glamorous. The substitution is funny, and it also makes sense. Sheep are identical and forgettable, which is why they lull. Princesses would each demand attention, so counting them is a guaranteed way to stay awake. It may also be an echo of the fairy tale of the princess who cannot sleep because of a pea beneath her mattresses. That is only an inference, but the poem's insistence on hardness makes it tempting. Either way, the line shows the mind already half in fantasy, close to dreaming but not across the border.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme, and no regular metre either. A rhyme would give the satisfying click of a lid closing, and its absence denies the reader that comfort, just as the speaker is denied rest. The lines also shrink: roughly eight syllables, then six, six and five, so the poem seems to thin out as the night wears on. The repeated "hard" at the start of both comparisons has the insistent rhythm of someone turning over and over. The sounds help as well. "Sleep" and "moon" are long, drowsy vowels, and "princesses" ends the poem on a soft hiss that sounds like a hush yet delivers no peace. The past tense "was" suggests the speaker is looking back from the other side, though the poem gives no sign of when.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It turns a private misery into a miniature fable with its own cast, and it makes insomnia feel universal and slightly comic at once. It never explains itself. It offers a beggar, a king, a moon and a procession of princesses, and trusts the reader to recognise the long hours between lying down and nodding off.