"I miss war" is a startling way to begin. Most of us expect a soldier's confession to come wrapped in apology, but Dave Bonta's "Old soldier" delivers it flat, with no excuse and no full stop. The poem runs to only eight lines, yet it keeps turning that confession over until it stops being about nostalgia and starts being about responsibility.
The speaker never gives the usual reasons for missing war, such as comradeship or glory. He misses a place "where night might call / my right eye to act / against me." The image is hard to pin down, which is part of its power. Judging by the wording, the right eye could be the one a right-handed shooter sights with, so that night summons the tool of the soldier's trade. But "against me" turns that tool into a traitor, and the body splits in two. The sound reinforces the split. "Night," "might," "right" and "eye" all share one long vowel, which is also the vowel of "I." The poem lets "eye" and "I" slide into each other, so the self acting against the self is built into the sounds themselves. War is remembered as a place of such extreme alertness that even one's own body could become an enemy, and the poem doesn't say whether that is terrifying or thrilling. Probably it is both.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is in the longest line: "and every city and county / is an atelier." An atelier is a studio, a workshop where things are made. The word is French, a little elegant, and it sits oddly among the plain, short words around it. "City and county" is a sweeping, almost bureaucratic phrase, and the line stretches to cover a whole map. The claim is that peacetime places are not the opposite of war but workshops, busy producing something.
What they produce is the question the poem withholds. The last couplet, "for what / I did not inquire," hangs on its line break. "For what" briefly reads as a question: for what purpose? Then the next line answers it with an admission that no one asked. The grammar is incomplete too. We expect "inquire into," and the missing word makes the sentence itself a place where inquiry has gone absent. "Inquire" is also a formal, official word, closer to a form or a committee than to a battlefield. It suggests the speaker followed orders and did his job without asking what it served, and that he went on not asking once he got home.
The form suits this evasiveness. There are four unrhymed couplets forming a single sentence, with no punctuation anywhere. Almost every line break cuts a phrase in half: "call / my right eye," "act / against me," "county / is." The reader keeps being tipped forward into the next line, and the poem never gets a stopping place. The missing final full stop matters most. Because the sentence is never closed, the not-inquiring seems to be still going on.
The title also does some work. "Old soldier" is a stock figure, a type we think we understand. The poem gives that type an uncomfortable inner life. The speaker is neither a hero nor a victim looking for sympathy. He is someone who half-recognises his own complicity, and that recognition leaves him longing for the place where danger was at least out in the open.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It doesn't condemn war, and it doesn't glorify it. It will not settle whether the guilt belongs to the speaker, to the cities and counties, or to everyone who never asked. In eight short lines it manages to make missing war and fearing it feel like the same emotion, and it ends with a question the speaker has not asked and the reader now has to.