An old hen scratches around a yard, and within six lines the whole human predicament has wandered in behind her. Dave Bonta's "Mortal" begins with the smallest of scenes and ends with a theological joke. It covers the distance between them so quietly that you barely notice you've crossed it.
The poem is about the odd bargain of being alive when you know life is temporary. The speaker watches the hen "going about the ground," then turns inward: "I have a mind to live / before winter happens." Winter is the season, but the verb "happens" makes it sound like an event that will befall us, and the title tells us what kind of event. The central idea arrives in the last two lines, where God, "like a good wit," tricks the speaker "into thinking I am home." Feeling at home in the world is presented as a trick, and a well-played one, rather than a plain fact.
The language is deliberately ordinary. "Going about the ground" is a slightly odd phrase. We might expect "scratching at" or "walking over," but "going about" has the sound of someone attending to daily business, and the hen seems to be doing just that. Her age matters too. Judging by the word "old," she is a creature well along in her life, and she shares the speaker's season. Then there is "I have a mind to live." That is the idiom we use for small impulses, like "I have a mind to take a walk," applied to the biggest subject there is. The casual phrasing keeps the poem from sounding grand, and it quietly sets the human "mind" beside the hen, who seems to go about her business without needing to decide anything.
The form is spare. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and the poem starts in lowercase, so it reads as one unbroken run of thought. Most lines are six or seven syllables long, and then the last line stretches to nine, as if the trick needs extra room to unfold. The first two lines contain no verb for the speaker to act on, only the hen caught in a snapshot. The human enters with "I" in line three. "I" and "God" are the only capitalised words in the poem, and they face each other across the final lines, the small mortal voice and the large joker. Sound ties the poem together as well. An h runs through "hen," "have," "happens" and "home," and the long o of "old" and "going" comes back in the final word, "home." The ear connects the hen's dooryard with the home the speaker is tricked into believing in.
The simile "God like a good wit" is the most interesting choice. It makes God a quick, playful figure who sets up a punchline, instead of a judge or a distant father. "Good" can mean skilful, since a good wit is hard to see through, or it can mean kind. The poem lets both readings stand. The trick might be a cruelty, because we are only passing through and are told otherwise. It might also be a mercy, because without the feeling of being at home no one would bother to live before winter. The present tense of "tricks" suggests the trick is ongoing, and the speaker seems to know about it and report it anyway. The wit, in other words, has not entirely fooled him, and he goes on feeling at home regardless.
That is what gives the poem its significance. It faces mortality without solemnity and without the usual poetic furniture. There are no swans or nightingales here, just a humble farmyard bird, and no deathbed, just a season approaching. It has the compression of a haiku, though it does not follow that form, and like the best short poems it turns on its last line. Because it ends without a full stop, the thought stays open, and the reader is left in the same position as the speaker, knowing winter is coming and still, for the moment, at home.