"Ravished" pulls two ways at once. It can mean plundered, seized by force, or swept away by delight. Dave Bonta's poem keeps both meanings alive for twenty-two lines. A human "we" looks at its own decay, grateful and a little ashamed, while hardy plants spread around it and sleek devices watch for the first sign that it has stopped. The central idea is an uneasy one. We are porous, rusting and fading, and sensitivity to beauty is all we have to set against that. It is also the one thing the "next-generation" machines cannot measure.
The poem opens on ruin that is also fullness: "missing heads and shrivelled petals / orotund with seed." *Orotund* usually describes a rich, booming voice, so a word about speech is applied to dying flowers. The next couplet makes the link explicit: "corn-fed on extra syllables / trapped between the teeth." Seed turns into language, and language into something overfed that lodges in the mouth like husks. The poem is knowingly wordy here. Its own diction (*orotund*, *rictus*, *missionary*) is a little too rich, and it seems to know it.
Then the human body arrives. "Nearly reptilian our rictus / of gratitude for another sun" gives us a grin that is also a grimace, a cold-blooded creature basking on a rock and glad to be warmed once more. The poem's closest thing to a rhyme follows: "let us trust the rust within us / to paint our noble ruins red." *Trust* and *rust* sit one consonant apart, and the sound carries the idea. Decay is something to be trusted, even welcomed. Judging by the imagery, the rust may also hint at iron and blood, so that ageing and bodily life are the same colour.
The middle of the poem turns outward to the plants. Knotweed, a plant with a reputation for spreading, "blossoms into lace," and devil's-tail "brandishes blue fruit." The language is delicate and aggressive at once. Then comes the line break that does the most work: "immune to anything that ravishes / without or within." *Without* means outside, but it also means lacking, so the phrase quietly suggests that the ravishing comes from both lack and intrusion. The next couplet calls the spreading things "miracules," a word that is not in the dictionary. It reads like *miracles* crossed with something tiny, perhaps spores or molecules, and their "missionary impositions" cast the plants as colonisers who convert by force. It is not entirely clear whether "they" are weeds, or whether the poem is also pointing at something human-made.
The poem's emotional centre comes in two plain couplets. First, "as we lower our last dreams / into the earth" echoes the opening seeds, because planting and burying are the same gesture. Then: "we who were never beautiful / but were sensitive to beauty." After all the ornate vocabulary, the diction here is simple and humble. It is the one moment of unguarded self-description, and it is the hinge of the poem.
The ending swerves into a different register altogether. Lanterns, those old and warm objects, are now "so sleek and next-generation," the language of product launches, and they are "monitoring our every flicker / for signs of life." *Flicker* belongs to flame and to a dying pulse alike. The irony is sharp, because the devices that check for life are themselves lifeless. Whether they are screens, sensors or hospital machines, the text leaves open, but the poem clearly places them in contrast to the weeds that thrive on their own.
Formally, the poem is eleven unrhymed couplets in lowercase, with no punctuation at all. The couplets give it a measured, almost liturgical pace, yet the sentences keep spilling over the breaks ("rictus / of gratitude", "ravishes / without or within"), so the poem never feels settled. There is no fixed metre, only the pressure of short lines and heavy consonants, and the last line stops without a full stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to choose between lament and praise. It grants the weeds their vitality, admits the body's decline, mocks a little of its own verbosity, and still holds on to the modest claim that being sensitive to beauty counts for something.