Quiet is not something you can normally drink, and stew is not something you can normally say you drank. Dave Bonta's "Flock" starts with that small, deliberate oddity: "Drank my morning quiet and my noon-time stew." One verb serves two very different objects, so silence becomes as physical as soup. The speaker is missing too. There is no "I", only a drained cup and a finished bowl, as if the sentence were a line from a private logbook. The colon at the end of the line promises an explanation. What follows is less an explanation than a widening of the view.
Line two is built from a chain of "for"s: "a study for a ring for a wedding for old soldiers." Each phrase opens inside the one before it, like boxes nested in boxes, and the reader is carried from something small and preparatory to something ceremonial. A "study" is a sketch or a practice piece, so the morning and noon of the first line seem to become a rehearsal for a larger event. The words stay open, though. The "ring" could be a wedding band, a circle of people, or a ring of sound. The wedding might belong to old soldiers, or be held in their honour. The poem never chooses, and that is the point. I'd suggest the chain feels like a cumulative chant, with the same small word repeated until it almost stops meaning anything. It sounds simple, but it hides how much the speaker leaves unexplained.
The final line settles into sound: "in the dark in the park where a far flock played." Its rhythm is a bouncing, nursery-rhyme beat (in the DARK in the PARK where a FAR flock PLAYED) that contrasts with the longer, more tangled second line. Rhyme comes only inside the line, in the neat chime of "dark" and "park", and the hard k sounds carry on into "flock". Then "far" and "flock" lock together through the shared f. The poem has no end rhyme at all, so these internal echoes do the work of closing it.
The most interesting word is "flock", which is also the title and which the poem never defines. Birds, sheep, children and musicians are all possible. The verb "played" tilts the reading towards children or music, but it could equally describe animals moving at dusk. The flock is also "far", so it is something heard or glimpsed rather than joined. Bonta gives the title a collective noun and lets the poem keep the members of the group out of sight.
Read as a whole, the poem traces the shape of a day: "morning", "noon-time", then "dark". The speaker consumes the day's first two stages and ends in a park, at night, watching or listening from a distance. A ring is also a circle, and the poem seems to trace one, from morning quiet to evening scene. That reading is an inference from the imagery, not something the text states. The whole poem is one sentence with one colon, so the syntax runs on the way a day does, with no full stop until the very end.
What makes "Flock" worth reading is how much it does with so little. It puts an ordinary, solitary day next to the language of ceremony, with its weddings, rings and old soldiers, and never says how they connect. One reasonable response is that the day itself is the "study", a quiet practice run for an occasion that happens elsewhere, among people the speaker only sees from afar. Another is that the connection is simply mood, the way an empty afternoon can feel as though it is leaning towards something. The poem supports both readings without confirming either. It works by suggestion, and its three lines, from the drunk quiet to the far-off playing, leave a lot of room for the reader to fill.