Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation: Dave Bonta's "Hunter" looks as if it could blow away like the weather it begins with. Yet it holds a surprising amount. A man goes out in wind and rain and stays "till dark." By the end of the day two things have drawn near him: his dead dog and a war that is "everywhere."
The opening word, "though," sets the tone. It suggests stubbornness, or need. Nobody hunts in a downpour for pleasure alone, and the poem hints that he is out there for some other reason. It never says what he is hunting, which war is meant, or how the dog died, and that restraint matters. With so little detail, the poem stays with the man and the weather, and what arrives at nightfall feels larger than any one story.
Two quiet euphemisms sit close together. The dog is "late," a polite word for dead, and the man "is gone." The second is only the ordinary idiom "gone hunting," but beside "late" it can also sound like "departed." Man and dog share a vocabulary of absence, as though he is already halfway into the place where the dog went. This is an inference from the wording, but the poem encourages it. The hunter is also without his dog, which is usually a hunter's companion, so the absence is part of the scene.
The construction rewards a slow look. The three couplets have lines of roughly five and seven syllables, then seven and five, then two and four. The poem narrows as it goes, like a day closing down, or like something creeping nearer. The grammar runs across the stanza breaks too. The compound subject, "his late dog and the war," sits at the end of the second couplet, and the verbs, "come close / suffer a touch," do not arrive until the third. The reader waits through a white gap for the verbs, which is a small imitation of dusk.
The second couplet is the strangest. "That everywhere war" has no verb. The word "war" appears twice, and the second time it almost behaves like an action, as if war were something the world is doing. "Everywhere" stretches the poem from one man on one hillside to the whole planet in a single word. There is also an unsettling echo in the subject. Hunting is itself a kind of small violence, so the war may not be wholly separate from what the man is doing, though the poem only lets us feel this and never states it. The sounds help. The hard d's of "dark" and "dog" knock together, and the long o of "blows" returns, softer, in "close."
The ending is the most daring part. "Come close" is how one speaks to an animal or a frightened child, and "suffer a touch" has two meanings. To "suffer" something can mean to endure pain, and it can also mean, in an older sense, to allow or permit. Both readings fit. The hunter may be hurt by what touches him, or he may finally let it near. Either way, touch is the only physical contact in a poem full of distance, and it is shared by a dog and a war. Putting them in one grammatical breath refuses to rank private grief against public catastrophe. In the dark they arrive in the same way, as presences at the edge of the body.
That is where the poem's significance lies. A great deal of writing about war works by scale, with armies, dates and casualties. "Hunter" works the other way, by showing how a vast event can reach a single person through an ordinary loss and bad weather. It does not explain or console. The poem simply stops at the moment of contact, and the open ending is what lingers. Its smallness makes the "everywhere" at its centre feel closer than a longer poem might.