Most poems about food start with taste or smell. Dave Bonta's "Lentil" starts with a word, and that word turns out to hold a surprising amount of space. The Latin subtitle, *Lens culinaris*, is the clue. "Lens" is the Latin name for the lentil, and our word for a curved piece of glass comes from the same root, because a lens is shaped like the seed. Bonta takes that scrap of etymology and follows it from the soup pot out to the edge of the universe.
The wordplay starts at once: "Until the lentil lent / its Latin name." The verb "lent" is a clipped-off piece of "lentil," as if the word were already lending itself out. A loan suggests a debt, and the poem seems to know the debt was never repaid. The legume gave its name to a whole family of instruments and got neglect in return: "Now it is / the legume that lags / in popularity." Even the sound plays along. Lentil, lent, Latin, lens, legume, lags and lenticular all lean on the same liquid *l*, so the words resemble one another like relatives.
The phrase "the apple of our eyes" is a neat piece of mischief. It is an old idiom for something cherished, and an apple is the wrong fruit for a seed. But the phrase also drags the eye into the poem, and the eye contains a lens of its own. The claim that the lens "went unknown among us" is a joke rather than a fact. It describes how a word can hide a thing we have always carried around with us.
After the colon the poem changes direction. We are "more apt to wonder" about "microscopic folk / peering blindly / up from the soup." The image is funny, and it reverses the usual view. Normally we look down into the bowl, but here tiny beings look up at us. The word "blindly" is a quiet irony, since the whole subject is seeing. Then the gaze goes upward again, to "lenticular cloud[s]" suspected of "hiding / a flying saucer." The poem has moved from the very small to the sky, and the second sentence rolls on with no pause, widening as it goes.
The last image is the best one. "The distant bulging disc / of an armless galaxy" is a precise description of a lenticular galaxy, a type with a central bulge and a flat disc but no spiral arms. The grammar is slippery. The saucer may be hiding *from* the galaxy, or may be hiding *and come from* it, and both readings add to the paranoid fun. "Armless" also gives the galaxy a faintly comic body, so even the cosmos ends up a little silly. The real pattern of the poem is a chain of shape-rhymes: lentil, lens, cloud, saucer, galaxy. They are all the same bulging disc at different scales, so the poem rhymes by sight instead of sound.
In form, "Lentil" is free verse with no end rhyme and no regular meter. Its lines are very short, often two or three words, and the line breaks work like small stumbles or surprises. "Now it is" stops on the weak word "is," and "lags" sits in the middle of a line, as though the poem itself were lagging. There are only two sentences, a short one that sets up the joke and a long one that carries it out. The ampersand in "& suspect" gives the voice a casual, jotted-down feel, which keeps the talk of galaxies from sounding grand.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets out of so little. It is a lesson in etymology, but it is also a gentle comment on attention. We build microscopes and telescopes and imagine tiny people and alien visitors, yet we overlook the ordinary seed that supplied the name for all that looking. The poem suggests, without lecturing, that language remembers humble things even when we do not. It also shows that a bowl of soup can be a place to start wondering.