Dave Bonta's poem opens with a squabble. The "seven deadly elements" fight "like nestlings for our worms," and a cosmic threat shrinks to something in a nest: noisy, hungry chicks, with us as the food. The title and that phrase seem to nod to Max Ernst's collage novel *Une semaine de bonté*, whose subtitle plays on the seven deadly sins. You don't need to know that to follow the poem, though. It takes the seven days of a week and turns them into a private routine for living alongside death.
The central idea arrives as a joke with a serious core: "Death is without end / and therefore never as shapely / as my morning eggs." Shape depends on limits. An egg is satisfying because it is whole and finite, and you can hold it. Death, being endless, has no outline to admire. By setting it against breakfast, the speaker quietly puts value on small, bounded, ordinary things, and does it in a deadpan voice that refuses grandeur.
The form supports this. There are five tercets and a closing couplet, no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short and conversational. What shapes the poem is its enjambment. Sentences keep running across stanza breaks, so "Death is without end" is followed by white space before "and therefore" continues the thought. The syntax won't stop where the stanza does, which enacts the endlessness the words describe. The same thing happens in the ouroboros sentence: "having just crawled out of / its own mouth." The snake literally emerges across the line break, and "its own mouth" lands alone on one of the shortest lines in the poem.
That image is the poem's boldest move. The ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, usually stands for a closed, self-consuming cycle. The speaker bristles at that reading with a bossy, almost schoolteacherly "Don't misconstrue," and insists the snake is "not consuming but giving birth." Mouths run through the poem, the nestlings' gaping ones and now this one. Appetite and birth turn out to come from the same opening. The cycle isn't only a loop of devouring but also one of renewal, and that links the snake to the eggs and chicks around it.
The fifth stanza brings in the speaker's daily attitude: "I wake every day of the week thinking / it's enough to follow / the warm curves of the earth." The word "curves" echoes the snake's circle and the egg's roundness, and "warm" makes the ground feel almost bodily. Then the poem is blunt: "though I know / it's nowhere good." There is no consolation, only plain monosyllables. The speaker goes on following the curves anyway, and the poem suggests that's what a life is.
The ending pulls the bird imagery together. After nestlings and eggs comes a dead adult bird, and the speaker dresses "as if to the funeral of a blackbird." The mourning is small and specific, scaled to a single creature rather than to humanity, and "dress" suggests a habit as much as a feeling. Then comes the last line, "seizing every kindness by the hair." The grammar is loose. Is the speaker doing the seizing, or the blackbird? A bird has no hair, so the grip seems human, or else kindness is being pictured as a person. Either way the verb is violent for something so gentle. Kindness isn't received politely here but grabbed, as if it might get away. The title's "week of kindness" turns out to be a week of effort, repeated each day.
What makes the poem significant is how much it holds in seventeen lines: mortality, hunger, rebirth, routine, and a wry tenderness. It takes big symbols, the elements and the ouroboros, and tests them against eggs and clothes. It neither despairs nor comforts. Its tone, funny on the surface and grieving underneath, makes the argument that when the road leads "nowhere good," kindness is worth fighting for each morning.