Noon, we're told, is part bees. It's a strange sentence and a lovely one, because it turns something we usually treat as a mark on a clock into something with ingredients. Dave Bonta's "Composition" runs on that idea: that times, moods and habits are made of things, and that we choose the recipe partly from what we've been told and partly from what we feel.
The title does quiet work. "Composition" can mean a piece of music or writing, the arrangement of a picture, or simply what a thing consists of. All three meanings fit. The poem is built from four two-line units, and each asks, in its own way, what something is made of: noon, night, a smile, a way of sitting.
The first two couplets belong to an anonymous "they." "Noon they say / is part bees" and "they say dark candles / make the night" sound like hearsay, the kind of folk wisdom repeated until it passes for fact. But the claims are odd. Judging by the imagery, the bees give noon a sound, the hum of full daylight heard rather than seen. The candles are a deliberate inversion. We expect them to push darkness back, yet these are "dark candles," unlit or black, and they "make the night." Day is made of something alive and buzzing, night of something still and humanly made. Neither is the explanation we would have expected, and the poem never says which, if either, is true.
The line breaks and the missing punctuation add to this. "Noon they say" has no commas, so "they say" can read as a sceptical aside or as part of the claim. The break after "say" holds the reader for a beat before "is part bees" lands. "Make the night" arrives as a short, flat line, like a verdict. Nothing is capitalised except "I," which quietly gives that one word extra weight.
That pronoun comes in the third couplet, and the poem turns. "From her smile / I smile." The reported voice of "they" disappears, replaced by a "her" and an "I" and a feeling no one needs to vouch for. The preposition "from" also echoes the title's question about what things are made of. The speaker's smile is composed of her smile, whether as a reflex, a reply, or something closer to a source. The repetition of "smile" works like a mirror, and the line shrinks from three syllables to two, so the second smile is literally smaller than the first, an echo of it. There is no rhyme anywhere in the poem, but this kind of repetition, along with "box" and "boxes" later, does the job rhyme usually does. It ties the lines together by sound.
The final couplet turns to an instruction, though the grammar is incomplete: "if we always sit in a box / lose the boxes." The "then" is missing, so it reads like a note to oneself or a slogan scrawled on a wall. It is also the longest line in the poem, seven syllables, stretched out and heavy. Then comes the clipped "lose the boxes," which feels like a release. The key word may be "always." The complaint isn't about boxes as such but about sitting in one out of habit. The shift from "a box" to "the boxes" suggests that once you start noticing, you find there were many more than you thought.
It is tempting to read the poem as an example of its own advice. Its four neat couplets are themselves small boxes, but what they hold refuses to behave: noon with bees in it, night made by dark candles, no punctuation to fence the sentences in. We might also hear the "they" of the opening as the voice of the box, the received view of how things are, which makes it interesting that what "they say" is so strange.
What makes the poem worth a reader's time is how much it does in about thirty words. It takes the idea of composition and treats it as something you can do, not just something that has been done to you. The world can be put together differently, by a bee, by a smile, by leaving the box. It also trusts the reader to make the connections, which is a good reason to read it twice.