A scallop is not an obvious subject for a prayer, yet Dave Bonta's "Scallop" gets from shellfish to faith and mortality in six short lines. It begins with a joke. The creature is "absurd for ears" yet "delicate of heart." The phrase can be read two ways. The ruffled shell might look absurdly like a pair of ears, or the idea of a scallop having ears at all might be the absurdity. Either way, the poem sets a hard shell beside a tender interior, and the rest follows from that contrast.
The middle couplet is the poem's one event: "it heard an alarm and clapped / only to go." Scallops escape danger by snapping their shells shut, and the poem turns that reflex into a single violent syllable, "clapped." The line break after it leaves a beat of silence before the next line gives the reason. "Only to go" is ambiguous in a useful way. It can mean the scallop clapped merely in order to leave, or that leaving was the only thing the clap achieved. The creature's whole response to fear is flight, and the line ends there, shorter than any other.
The last couplet makes a leap that the word "so" pretends is logical: "so I bless God but fear / my candle going out." The scallop's panic seems to remind the speaker of their own fragility. The candle is the oldest image for a life, and "going out" echoes the scallop's "go." There is also a physical joke inside it, which is my inference rather than anything the poem says. A clapping, darting shell would stir the water, and a flame is the kind of thing a sudden movement can snuff. A small, nervous creature and a small, nervous flame become versions of each other.
The poem's quietest effect is in its sounds. "Ears," "heard" and "heart" are close relatives. "Heart" has "ear" buried inside it, and "heard" differs from it by a single letter. The poem says that hearing and feeling are tangled together, and the scallop shows it. It is "delicate of heart," and it is the hearing of an alarm that sets everything off. Even "fear" at the end rhymes with "ears" at the start, so the opening and closing couplets are tied together across the poem's whole length. Nothing else rhymes. "Clapped" and "go," "heart" and "alarm" only brush against each other, and that loose, unrhymed texture suits the subject, since the poem itself seems to be listening.
The rhythm is spare and uneven. The first line runs to about eight syllables, and the poem then shrinks to the four syllables of "only to go," like something retreating into its shell. Ending the poem on "my candle going out" makes the last line feel like the flame flickering. There is no punctuation and almost no capitalisation. Only "I" and "God" stand upright, so the speaker and the divine are the two things given weight in a lowercase world. "Bless God" puts two stressed syllables side by side, a firm, almost blunt gesture of gratitude that the next word, "but," immediately undercuts.
That "but" holds the poem's central idea. The speaker doesn't resolve gratitude and fear into comfort. They give thanks and are afraid in the same sentence, and the poem accepts that this is how a fragile creature lives. A reader might also recall that the scallop shell has long been a pilgrim's emblem. The poem never says so, but the association adds a faint sense of a journey that ends in being snuffed out.
The poem matters because it is so small and refuses to be bigger. It doesn't explain mortality or defend faith. It watches a shellfish flinch and lets the flinch speak for the human reader, who is also easily startled and also holding a light.