Anyone who has built something in wet sand knows the deal: the tide is coming, and it won't be impressed. Dave Bonta's "Ephemera" begins from that knowledge, then swings the question away from the sea and toward us. The title already settles the fate of the art, since ephemera are things made to last a short time. What the poem wants to know is whether, in that short time, the art will do anything at all. "Will it sing."
The shape of the poem makes this feel fragile. It has three couplets, no capital letters and no punctuation, not even a question mark after "will it sing." The question never closes, so it hangs there like the unanswered thing it is. The opening phrase, "art out of sand at the sea," has no verb. It is simply held up for inspection, like an object on a palm. The sounds gather around it: the soft *s* of "sand," "sea" and finally "sing" hisses like surf, and the word "sing" arrives as the payoff of a sound the line has been building. There is no rhyme, but there is a pattern of length. By my count, the first couplet runs long then short (seven syllables, then three), the second flips it (three, then eight), and the third settles into an even pair of five and five. The poem seems to swell, tip over, and level out, a little like a wave.
The middle couplet supplies the listeners, and the choice is deliberate. "A whore" and "a church lady with white gloves" sit at opposite ends of respectability, one named bluntly and the other dressed with a single precise detail. The gloves are the poem's only real colour and texture, and they suggest tidiness, ceremony and hands that keep clear of anything dirty, even sand. Both figures are types rather than individuals, and the repeated "to" lines them up like items on a list. The effect is a kind of fairness. Art, if it sings, should be able to sing to the shunned and the proper alike, and the poem doesn't tell us which would hear it better.
Then comes the turn that gives the poem its edge: "to us." The articles disappear (no more "a whore," "a church lady"), and the audience becomes first person. We are the last, and probably the most doubtful, listeners. The phrase "news ear" is deliberately awkward, a compressed, slightly broken compound. Judging by the surrounding words, it suggests an ear trained on headlines, always angled toward whatever is new and so deaf to whatever is quietly there. "A going mouth" works similarly. A mouth that keeps going is one that chatters and never stops to listen. The word "going" also has a second sense that fits the title, since things that are going are on their way to being gone. The audience, in other words, is as passing as the sand sculpture.
That is where the poem's quiet cleverness lies. We expect the threat to the art to be the sea, but the sea never appears again after the first line. The danger that remains is our inattention. The art may be perfectly able to sing, and the open question is whether anyone has an ear free to hear it. Sand is a good material for this idea, too. Some dunes and beaches are known to hum or squeak underfoot, so the notion of sand singing is not entirely fanciful, though the poem never leans on that and it may be only an echo.
The poem is also ephemeral in its own body. It is small, unpunctuated, and it ends on "mouth" without a full stop, as if it were already being taken by the tide. In a few plain words it asks what we owe to things that cannot last, and it makes us notice that we are in a hurry. It doesn't scold. It lets the question stay open, which is how a reader ends up thinking about it long after the poem is over.