Hardly any of "Lunar" is about the moon as an object in the sky. The moon turns up in disguise instead: hidden in the name of the luna moth, announced flatly as "Full moon," lent to a schoolgirl as a description ("moon-faced"), promised in the title of a childhood book, and finally spilled across a forest floor as a patch of light. Dave Bonta gives us five glimpses with no explanation, and they add up to a poem about being new in the world and not quite fitting into it.
Newness is the thread that holds the stanzas together. The luna moth is "hours old," and its wings "still look / as if they don't fit," as though it had been handed a body a size too large. The book has a "new-book smell." The last stanza ends on "my sudden boots," where the speaker seems freshly arrived in his own feet. Even the starving kitten is at the very beginning of life, and its need is the most urgent in the poem. Its cry for milk is the one moment where the moon's glamour runs into plain hunger. Bonta doesn't comment on the contrast. Setting "Full moon" next to a crying kitten is enough, and the lack of sentiment (the word is "starving," not "tiny" or "mewing") keeps the poem honest.
The structure is simple and carefully varied. Each stanza is a tercet, and each opens with a small marker of time or place: "Hours old," "Full moon," "At school," "Forty years on," "Entering a patch of moonlight." The poem moves outward from nature (moth, kitten) to society (the squire's daughter, one of "many Emilys") and then inward to memory and the body. The first person doesn't appear until the fourth stanza, with "I remember," and then it takes over the last one. The speaker walks into his own poem the way he walks into the moonlight. The schoolgirl stanza adds something quieter. "Moon-faced" is a casual, slightly unkind schoolyard label, and "one of many Emilys" suggests how hazily she is remembered, a type more than a person. The word "squire" quietly sets her in a world of rank and old-fashioned names, and the poem lets that hang without explaining it.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from short lines and the pauses at their ends. The break after "still look" makes the reader hesitate before "as if they don't fit," and the sentence seems to wobble on its new wings. Sound does the work rhyme might have done. Soft m and l sounds drift through "luna," "full," "moon," "milk," "Emilys," "smell," and "moonlight," a gentle hum behind the title. The long "oo" of "moon" returns in "new," "You," and "boots," so the last word echoes the poem's central sound in a heavier, more earthbound form.
That ending is the best moment. The book title, "You Will Go To The Moon," is set in capitals, like a promise made to a child. The moon it describes is a destination, a place of astronauts and ambition. What the adult speaker actually gets is far more modest: a patch of moonlight in a forest, no bigger than a rug. Yet that is where something happens. The light catches his boots, and they look strange and "sudden," as if he were seeing himself arrive. The phrase also echoes the moth's wings from the first stanza. Both are parts of a body that seem not yet quite one's own, lit up by the same pale light. The moon never takes the speaker anywhere. It simply makes him see himself as the moth is seen, still unfinished and surprised to be here.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. In fifteen short lines it gets from a moth to a man, from instinct to memory, without a single argument. It trusts its images and lets them carry the idea, that moonlight shows how provisional we all are, that childhood promises come true in smaller, odder forms than we expected, and that feeling out of place may be the oldest feeling there is. The poem asks us to notice that, and then it lets us stand in the light for a moment.