Most poems about the sacred reach upward. Dave Bonta's "Rites" looks down, at the dinner plate and at the foot. In six unpunctuated lines it proposes that the only holy day worth keeping is the one we are already inside, and that the way to keep it is to eat, wear things out and grow old.
The opening couplet sets up a religious frame and then quietly rearranges it. "Today is the first holy day / we observe by living." Normally a holy day is marked off from ordinary time by fasting, kneeling or abstaining. Here the observance is just being alive, which nobody can skip. The word "observe" works twice: we keep the day, and we also watch it, paying attention. "First" can mean the earliest holy day, or it can mean that every day is new and has never been lived before. The title "Rites" promises ceremony, and what follows is a ceremony with no priest, no building and no script.
The second couplet is the strangest, and it gives the poem its flavor: "almost any gland is worth a dinner / so full and so giving." "Gland" is an unglamorous word, clinical and a little comic, and it points to the parts of an animal most people overlook, the offal that thrifty cooks refuse to waste. The line praises appetite without squeamishness. The grammar is also open. "So full and so giving" could describe the gland, the dinner or the body that eats it. Glands secrete and give off, so the word hints that bodies are generous by nature, while the meal itself becomes a kind of communion in which one living thing feeds another. The "almost" matters too. It makes the speaker sound like a practical person, not a zealot.
The last couplet turns from eating to aging. "Who should we age into / if not a shoe" is phrased as a question, but there is no question mark, so it hangs in the air like a half-joke. A shoe is a good model for aging because it improves with use. It starts stiff, then softens and takes the shape of the foot, and by the end it carries the marks of every road it has covered. Leather also connects back to the meal, since it comes from an animal, so the poem's last image belongs to the same material world as the glands. A reader might also hear a faint pun on "sole" and "soul." The poem never says so, but it would fit the way the poem makes spiritual ideas sit in physical objects.
The construction is spare and careful. The poem is three couplets in lowercase with no punctuation, which gives it a casual, overheard feel, as if the speaker were thinking aloud over breakfast. The rhymes are gentle. "Living" and "giving" close the first and second couplets and tie them together, so that living and giving become almost the same act. "Into" and "shoe" rhyme within the final couplet, and because "into" is a weak word to end a line on, the rhyme sounds natural, not engineered. The line lengths also do work. Line three, at ten syllables, is the longest in the poem, as if the dinner had spread out across the page. Then the poem tapers to "if not a shoe," only four syllables, which lands with a small, flat finality, like a foot coming down.
The tone is what makes the poem hard to forget. It sounds solemn at first and ends on a shoe, and that deflation is deliberate. The humor does not undercut the seriousness. It protects it, because a poem that announced its reverence loudly would sound false, and one that smiles while saying it is easier to trust.
That is where its significance lies. In very little space it offers a view of life that is reverent without being otherworldly. Holiness is found in appetite, in the body's chemistry and in the slow wearing-in of a life, and the reader is invited to treat the next ordinary day as the first holy day. The poem is easy to read in ten seconds, but its last image keeps the reader thinking about what kind of worn thing they would be glad to become.