Proverbs normally arrive with their meaning attached: look before you leap, don't count your chickens. Dave Bonta's "Proverbial (13)" borrows the shape of such sayings and leaves the meaning out. Three tiny scenes follow, each a sentence that feels like inherited wisdom, and the reader has to work out what the wisdom is. The central idea, as I read it, is that need and fulfilment keep trading places. Thirst, hunger and a lost mount are all forms of lack, and in each stanza something odd happens to that lack. It is denied, bowed to, or turned into an order.
The first couplet is the most mysterious. "Sun on the water / shall never thirst" has the cadence of scripture, and "shall never thirst" carries the ring of biblical promise. But the subject is a glitter on a lake, not a believer. One reading is that whatever lies on the water is already in the thing it might crave, so it cannot lack. Another is that the sun draws water upward and still never runs dry of it. The bare noun "Sun," with no article, makes it feel elemental, more a condition than an object.
The second stanza brings in a person, and the language gets slower. "An excellent cook took" ends on a verb that hangs for a moment at the line break. We might expect him to take a dish, a pan or the credit. The next line corrects us: "the sacrament on his knees." The cook is a professional of abundance, someone who feeds others and knows what a good meal is. Here he receives a scrap of bread and a sip of wine, and he kneels to do it. "Excellent" is the only word of praise in the poem, and it makes the point. Skill does not exempt anyone from being fed. The hard k sounds in "excellent," "cook" and "took" clatter like a kitchen before the line settles into the softer, hushed sibilance of "sacrament."
In the third stanza the grammar does the storytelling. "A captain forced to walk" is passive: someone or something has taken his horse, or his dignity. Then the sentence turns active with "ordered ships to carry horse." The same man who was made to go on foot now commands whole fleets. The missing article in "carry horse" gives it the clipped sound of a logistics report, and it makes the horse a collective noun, an entire cavalry's worth of animals. It is unclear whether this captain is a soldier or a sailor, and that ambiguity adds to the proverbial feel. Is the point that deprivation breeds ambition? That the man who has lost something knows best how to provide it? The poem withholds its answer.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed couplets, with no fixed meter, but it is carefully paced. The first couplet is four syllables and four, tight and balanced. The next two stretch to six and seven. In each stanza the second line is the longer, heavier one, as if the moral weight settled at the end. Each stanza also closes on a hard, stressed monosyllable: "thirst," "knees," "horse." The poem ends like a gate being shut. There is also a quiet shift of tense. The opening uses a prophetic "shall," a timeless future, while the other two stanzas slip into the past tense of anecdote. These sayings are half oracle, half history.
The number in the title suggests one of a series, though that is an inference from the title alone. Whatever its context, the poem's significance lies in what it reveals about how wisdom sounds. A saying feels true because of its syntax: the indefinite article, the participle ("a captain forced…"), the confident, rhythmic close. Bonta keeps those mechanics and removes the lesson. The poem becomes a small experiment, and the reader's own mind supplies the morals. It also shows how much can be packed into about thirty words: a prayer, a kitchen, a harbor, and the suspicion that every need hides its own answer.