A rat gets the first real sound in Dave Bonta's tanka, and it is not a timid one. In three short lines, a fall wind and a "bold rat" set a scene of cold and scarcity. Then two longer lines step back and say what the scene has meant: "poverty grown so great / we have just one another." The central idea is that when everything else has been stripped away, human company is what remains. The poem never says whether that is a comfort or a loss, and the tension between the two is where its force lies.
The opening three lines are fragments with no verb, as if the poem were only listening. "Fall wind" arrives in lowercase with no punctuation, and the season itself does some of the work. Autumn points toward winter, the time when scarcity bites. The sound words are carefully chosen. "Rattle" imitates what it describes, and its sound is picked up again, shortened, in "rat," so the last two lines seem to scrabble. Things also rattle when they are loose or hollow, so the word hints at emptiness before the poem names it. The line break after "of" holds back the noun for a beat, and the rat arrives like an intrusion. "Bold" is the most telling word in the poem. Rats are usually furtive, and this one is brazen. Judging by what follows, a household too poor to guard anything, or too weary to chase an intruder, might invite that boldness. The rat reads the situation and acts on it.
The turn comes between the two parts. Up to this point everything has been heard, and now the poem states a fact. "Poverty" is the first abstract word, and it names what the images only suggested. "Grown" is a surprising verb for it, since we grow crops and children, and here poverty seems to have been cultivated by time until it is "so great." Even "great," normally a word of praise, is bent toward lack. Then the grammar changes. The upper lines were fragments, but "we have just one another" is a complete clause with a subject and a verb, and the first-person plural appears for the first time. The pronoun suggests, though the poem does not say, that two or more people are sharing this moment, perhaps even listening to the rattle together.
"Just" does a lot of work in that final line. It can mean "only," which gives the line a bleak edge, but it can also mean "exactly" or "no more than is needed," which lets some tenderness in. "One another" is reciprocal, so each person is the other's entire holding. The words are plain monosyllables, apart from the soft, rolling "another," and nothing in the language pleads for pity. "Great" also ends on the same hard *t* as "rat," a faint echo across the break that links the intruder to the condition he seems to have noticed.
The form helps this restraint. A tanka traditionally has five lines and a pivot between an upper and a lower part. Bonta follows that shape while keeping to the compact manner common in English-language tanka. The poem has about twenty-two syllables, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its rhythm comes from line length. The first three lines are tiny, at roughly two, four and three syllables, and they sound clipped, like noises in the dark. The last two lengthen to about six and seven syllables and move at the pace of a spoken admission, almost a sigh. The poem grows longer as it moves from the noise outside to what is true inside.
The poem is significant because it makes poverty felt rather than explained. There is no list of what is missing, no complaint, and no appeal to the reader. One sound and one sentence do the work, and the reader is trusted to connect them. Is the wind cold? Is the house bare? Who are "we"? The poem leaves these questions open, and the gaps make it more affecting. By the end, the rat is the only creature in the poem with any confidence, while the people have only each other. The word "just" holds both the despair and the tenderness of that admission.