An empty plate becomes the full moon, and that one swap shows how the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Amazing Grace" gets by. The poem is a compact prose paragraph followed by a three-line coda. It is about renaming misery until it looks like something you could live with, and about what that renaming costs.
The first sentence sets the terms. "I mistook dysphoria for euphoria once on purpose." The two words are near mirror images, a bad state and a good one separated by a prefix, and the phrase "on purpose" turns self-deception into a craft. Then comes the deadpan "and it almost worked." The word "almost" carries the poem's whole emotional temperature. What follows is a demonstration of the method. Winter, "not summer," is "the season of light." Judging by the forest setting, this is probably because bare branches let the sun through, but the poem gives no explanation and states the paradox as plain fact. Then comes the logical little connective "And so," as if the plate turning into the moon were a conclusion rather than a leap. The plate is round, pale and vacant, so hunger turns into a night sky. The title may add another layer here. "Grace" is also the prayer said over a meal, and this meal is missing.
The title also calls up the famous hymn about being lost and then found. The poem's "once" and its "almost worked" read like a conversion story that falls a little short. Whatever redemption arrives is improvised from what is lying around.
The household objects are the most vivid part. The mouse in the filing cabinet is a "companion animal," a clinical, almost bureaucratic phrase for a pet, applied to an intruder in an office fixture that has ended up in the woods. She shreds the speaker's "old poems for nesting material," a joke with a sting: the past work has become bedding, and its only reader is a rodent. Yet the poem is tender about her. She is "her," and her gnawing, heard "late at night," is the sound of company. Meanwhile the speaker builds "a cenotaph out of cigarette butts." A cenotaph is a monument to someone buried elsewhere, an empty tomb, so it fits a poem built on emptiness. The poem never says who is being commemorated. It may be an earlier self, though that is an inference. The materials are small, spent things, each one a bit of the builder's own breath. The hard, clicking consonants of "cenotaph," "cigarette" and "butts" give the sentence a littered feel.
The prose paragraph has no rhyme and no line breaks, and its rhythm is plain. After the long opening sentence the statements get shorter and flatter, joined by "And so" and the dry, slightly offbeat "I meanwhile was building." That deadpan tone keeps sentimentality out. The last sentence of the paragraph is the strangest: "My disemboweled television watched over me while I slept." The adjective is almost gruesome for an appliance. The gutted set, once a window on the world, is now a guardian angel in ruins. If grace exists in this poem, it arrives through broken things.
Then the form changes to three short lowercase lines with no punctuation, closer to a haiku in feel than in strict syllable count:
last cigarette
as long as grass grows
or rivers run
The phrase "last cigarette" is ambiguous. It could mean the speaker has quit, or that something larger is ending. The second and third lines seem to echo an old formula of promised permanence, a phrase associated with treaty rhetoric, and the hymn of the title also speaks of a promise lasting "as long as life endures." Here that language of forever is attached to something that burns down in minutes. Perhaps the line is bitter, a reminder of how hollow such promises can be. Perhaps it is gently comic. Perhaps it is a wish that this one small ritual could last as long as the landscape.
The poem matters because it refuses both despair and uplift. It gives us a speaker who knows his consolations are invented and keeps inventing them anyway. In Bonta's version, grace is something you improvise, with a mouse, a dead television and a pile of ash, and the poem leaves it unclear whether that is enough.