Dave Bonta's "Skeptic" runs to only six lines. It has no punctuation, no capital letters except the lone "I," and no argument in the usual sense. A skeptic is supposed to demand proof and find it lacking, but this speaker simply sets down what he has not seen beside what someone else has done, and lets the gap between them do the thinking.
The opening is hard to picture on purpose: "day like a hole for light / I have not seen." A day is normally full of light. Here it is a hole, an opening that waits for a light the speaker admits he has never witnessed. Because nothing is punctuated, the line break works as a hinge. "I have not seen" can close the first image, or it can slide forward into "I have not seen / an orange undressed." Both readings hold at once. The poem swings from something cosmic, a light beyond experience, to something domestic, a piece of fruit, within a single breath.
The orange is where the poem turns physical. "Undressed" is a surprising verb for peeling. It makes the fruit a body and the act faintly intimate, almost tender. Then comes "four and twenty pieces," an old-fashioned way of saying twenty-four that recalls the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" and its four and twenty blackbirds. The number is also far more than most oranges give, so the peeling feels like a small, slightly impossible abundance. The language is half fairy tale, half scripture-like solemnity, which is a strange register for a skeptic to borrow. He doubts the large promises but cannot help sounding a little biblical about a piece of fruit.
The final couplet reveals who is doing the peeling: "you our neighbors / you our hopes of a hereafter." The second "you" starts the line again, as if the speaker were correcting himself or deepening the first description. Neighbors become hopes, and the possessive "our" makes the hope communal rather than private. The poem never says who "you" are. They might be believers, or the dead, or just the people next door. One reading, which is an inference rather than anything the poem states, is that the skeptic cannot see the promised light but can see a neighbor's generosity, and that this is the nearest thing to a hereafter he can honestly point to. A bleaker reading is also possible, in which "our hopes of a hereafter" is a dry joke about how little we have to hope on. The poem doesn't choose between them.
Sound quietly knits the poem together. The "h" runs through "hole," "have," "hopes," and "hereafter," and "hole" and "hopes" share nearly the same vowel, so the emptiness of the first line returns in the last as longing. Inside "hereafter" sit the words "here" and "after," which hints that any afterlife worth believing in might be found in the here and now. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines alternate between short and long, roughly six syllables then four, then five and seven, then five and seven again. The short "I have not seen" sits alone like a hush, while the longer lines at the end stretch out as if reaching for something. The three couplets also fit the thought: each is a small unit, and together they build one loose sentence that doesn't land until "by you."
The poem's significance lies in this restraint. It treats skepticism as honesty rather than emptiness. The speaker says plainly what he hasn't seen, yet he pays close attention to what he can see, and the poem suggests that this attention is a kind of faith. For a student, it shows how much a few lines can carry when line breaks, a single odd verb, and an unnamed "you" are all doing deliberate work. Its ending offers no reassurance, and the open question it leaves is much of its pull.