Few subjects in poetry are as worn smooth as the moon, so it is a small shock to meet one that arrives with disease on its hands. Dave Bonta's "Moon" takes six short lines and uses them to take apart the silver, romantic moon and put something far colder in its place. The central idea is indifference. This moon shapes, withholds and wounds, and it feels nothing about any of it.
The opening line is a flat statement, almost a riddle's answer: "the moon is a plague-smith." The coinage does a lot of work. A smith makes things, heating and hammering them into shape, so the moon becomes a craftsman. What it manufactures is plague, which makes the night sky a forge for sickness. The poem gives no reason for this. Older folk ideas that the moon governs madness and illness may lie behind the image, but the poem never says so, and its force comes from asserting the claim without explaining it.
The second line explains the moon's trade in a different way: it is "changing from treasure to pit." Read literally, this is the lunar cycle, with the full moon shining like a coin or a hoard and the dark moon a hole in the sky. The craters we see on its face may also be in play, since a pit is something the moon visibly has. Either way, the movement is from value to void, and the word "changing" suggests that nothing about this brightness can be trusted to last.
In the second couplet the poem switches from metaphor to simile and starts to speak of the body: "like a hand which never opened / but in indifference." The line break matters. After "opened" we expect the sentence to end, with a hand that stays closed. Then "but in indifference" arrives and changes the meaning. The hand does open, but only when it doesn't care. We can picture a fist that held the "treasure" of the previous couplet and releases it with a shrug, so that whatever falls on us falls by accident. Generosity is ruled out, and so is cruelty. What remains is a power that simply doesn't notice us, which may be more unsettling than malice.
The last couplet opens with another "or," as though the poem were still searching for the right image: "or a flying wound / puffed up by a bone-fire heart." The moon is now an injury loose in the air. "Puffed up" suggests swelling, and given the plague of the first line it is hard not to think of the inflamed lumps that mark that disease. The phrase can also mean bloated with pride, which fits a moon that looks down so remotely. "Bone-fire" is the most interesting compound. It makes us hear the old root of "bonfire" and picture burning bones, which in a poem about plague carries a grim suggestion of bodies being disposed of. Judging by the imagery, the heart is both the moon's glow and a furnace for the dead. A wound that has a heart is a strange, slightly horrifying creature, and the poem lets it hang there unresolved.
The construction is spare and consistent. There are three couplets and no rhyme. There are no capitals and no punctuation, so the poem seems to float, with nothing to mark where one thought ends and the next begins. The images move steadily inward and downward, from a tradesman to a hand to a wounded, burning heart. The moon starts as a distant craftsman and ends as something raw and bodily. The lines are short and the rhythm is uneven, slowing at the stressed compounds "plague-smith" and "bone-fire," each of which makes the reader stop and take in two heavy words at once. Hard consonants, especially the p in "plague," "pit" and "puffed," give the sound a faint spitting edge.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without argument. It never says the universe is indifferent. It lets a hand open, and lets the reader feel that nothing in it was meant for us. By taking the most familiar object in the night sky and making it a smith, a fist and a wound, it shows how quickly a comforting image can turn strange once someone looks at it without sentiment.