Sixteen words, five lines, and a war: Dave Bonta's "Correspondence" is so small that every word has to carry weight, and the title is the first to do so. Correspondence means letters, but it also means matching up, one thing answering to another. The poem plays on both senses. It sets letters in wartime beside the people who read about them, and it quietly asks whether the two correspond at all.
The opening line, "White and char," gives us two colours before we know what they belong to. The syntax is inverted. Plain speech would say "letters in war go white and char," but the poem puts the colours first, so the reader sees paper and its burnt remains before seeing the word "letters." The verb "go" is slippery. Letters go in the sense of travelling, being sent, but they also "go white" or "go char" in the sense of turning into something else. Judging by the imagery, white may suggest the blank page, or the pallor of fear, and char the letter that is burned, whether by accident, by fire, or deliberately so no one else can read it. The poem doesn't choose, and the uncertainty is part of its force. Either way, letters in war are fragile, and they end up as ash.
The purpose clause "to stop time" hangs at the end of the sentence. A letter does try to stop time: it fixes a moment, a voice, a "still alive," and sends it forward so it can outlast the day it was written. A burned letter stops time more brutally, by ending a message before it arrives. The poem keeps both possibilities open. It names no particular war, no side, no year, and that lets any reader's idea of war fill the space.
Then comes the pivot: "But we dine / on ice." The word "But" turns the poem from a distant "they" to a sudden "we," which pulls the reader in. "Dine" is a leisurely, civilised verb that suggests a tablecloth and a set table. "Ice" is not food at all. It is what chills a drink, and here it is the whole meal. This could be cold comfort, a dinner with nothing nourishing in it, or a sign of emotional frozenness, a way of eating while the war stays far away. There is also a link back to "stop time." Ice is time stopped, water held still. The letters try to stop time and burn, while we stop it effortlessly and coldly. The poem sets fire against ice without ever using either word directly. It leaves "char" and "ice" to do the work, and the reader supplies the heat and the cold.
The sound of the poem supports this. The lines run three, five, three, three and two syllables, a shape that tapers like a message being cut short. The heavy stresses fall close together in "WHITE and CHAR" and "stop TIME," so the phrases land like stamps. The rhymes are loose but audible. "Char" and "war" are a near-rhyme, close enough that the ear links ash and conflict. "Time" and "dine" form a slant rhyme, sharing a long *i* and a nasal ending, and that quietly connects stopping time with sitting down to eat. Then "ice" arrives with the same bright *i* vowel but no partner to answer it. The pattern of pairs breaks off, and the last word sits alone, as cold and isolated as its meaning. The long *i* also runs through "white," "time," "dine" and "ice," a thin, bright sound that suits the poem's chill. "White" at the start and "ice" at the end make a loop in which the only dark word, "char," is surrounded by pale ones.
The poem is significant because it makes a moral point without stating one. It never says that comfortable people are indifferent to suffering, or that letters from a war zone deserve better attention. It places a burning page next to a frozen meal and lets the contrast do the accusing. The title then turns ironic: the two halves of the poem do not correspond, and the gap between them is the subject. In so few words, the poem leaves the reader to decide who "we" are and whether that cold dinner is something we can still refuse.