Death turns up in the first line of Dave Bonta's "Time" and makes no fuss about it. "time got me ready / for my grave": no capital letter, no punctuation, no cushioning adjective. The speaker doesn't say that time is running out or that the grave is waiting. He says time has been preparing him, as if it were a patient trainer and he the one being trained. The rest of the poem is about what that calm is made of.
The answer comes in the second couplet, and it is a surprise: "a brave proud horse / of good purpose." Grammatically, the phrase can attach to time itself, so that time is the horse, or it can describe a real animal from the speaker's past. The poem never chooses, and the ambiguity is useful. "Got me ready" is the language of saddling and schooling a horse, so the speaker seems to be both the rider and the animal being readied. Time becomes something warm-blooded that he can walk beside, rather than an abstraction that chases him. The next couplet supports this: "we walked up and down / and into the evening." The movement is unhurried, with no destination until the walk drifts into dusk. "Evening" is the obvious hint that a life, not just a day, is winding down, though the poem leaves the reader to make that connection.
The sound of the poem is carefully managed. Nearly every word is a single syllable, which gives the lines a plain, spoken weight. The only full rhyme, "grave" and "brave," falls across the break between stanzas, so that death and courage sit side by side without comment. "Horse" and "purpose" share a hissing, half-rhyming ending, a quieter echo. And "a brave proud horse" is three heavy stresses in a row, which slows the line to something like the beat of hooves. "Good purpose" is similarly plain moral language, close to the vocabulary of a eulogy. It is praise given simply, without decoration.
The shape of the poem also changes as it goes. It is four couplets, and the first few lines are short and clipped. The lines lengthen as the walk moves "into the evening," as if the poem were stretching its legs. Then comes a shift of tense and person. Until now everything has been past tense ("got," "walked"), and the speaker has been only a "me" or a "we." In the last couplet the present tense arrives with "I miss," and "I" is the only capital letter in the whole poem. The self steps forward at the moment of loss, which is a quiet and effective way to mark feeling without ever naming it as grief.
The final image is the richest. "That hour or two" is a modest, almost shrugging measure, and there is a paradox in it: time prepared him for death, yet what he misses is a small piece of time. Amber suggests why. It is fossilised resin that can trap a living thing and hold it unchanged, so the remembered walk is preserved, beautiful and fixed. But amber is also a kind of tomb, and "lying" quietly echoes the grave of the opening lines. Amber is also the colour of low evening light, which ties the image back to the walk. The word "lying" might even hint that memory flatters, though that is an inference rather than something the poem states. It is also unclear whether the hour is lying in amber or the speaker is, and the grammar allows both.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much with so little. In eight short lines it holds consolation and sorrow together without letting either win. It never says who or what is missed: a horse, a companion, a younger self, or time itself. That openness makes it feel true, since longing rarely comes with a clear label. For students, it is a good example of how plain words, lowercase restraint and one well-chosen image can carry an idea as large as mortality. The last word, "amber," is soft and unstressed, so the poem doesn't end on a note of despair. It simply stops, as the evening does.