Five lines, no verbs, no punctuation, and still a whole change of feeling. Dave Bonta's "Breastfeeding" starts out sounding like a note about supermarket meals and ends in something close to prayer. The subject is a baby being nursed, but the poem is really about how that act looks from two angles: as a practical arrangement, and as the first and deepest act of trust. The poem doesn't say who is speaking, and it doesn't need to. Everything depends on its words.
The opening phrase, "a dinner of convenience," is deliberately flat. It belongs to the language of ready meals and quick fixes. The next line deepens the joke: "expedient" is a word for a handy shortcut, the sort of thing a committee might call a solution. Applying it to a mother's milk is funny, and it also rings true. Milk needs no shopping, no cooking, and no warming, so it really is the most convenient food there is. Then the poem swerves. "Bread" is a bigger word than "dinner." It suggests the staple of life, "daily bread," bread broken and shared, and it carries a faint religious glow. Milk isn't bread, of course, and the metaphor makes the claim for it anyway. Even the adjective "deep" does quiet work. It is the one word in the line that isn't about practicality, and it suggests that the nourishment comes from somewhere far inside the body.
The third line is where imagination takes over. "Dug" is a rough, old, earthy word, the sort used for an animal's udder, and Bonta picks it over the politeness of "breast." It refuses to be delicate. It also sits close to "deep," and together they suggest a well, something dug into the ground that water can be drawn from. Then comes the poem's only simile: "like a white dolphin." The comparison is surprising and exact. A dolphin is smooth, pale, and curved, and it is a mammal, so it nurses its young too. The image carries us from kitchen to sea and makes the breast a living creature surfacing into view. Four stressed *d* sounds, in "dinner," "deep," "dug," and "dolphin," also thread through the three lines, giving them a low, steady thud that fits the subject.
The poem has no rhyme, and the first three lines are long and level, about seven or eight syllables each. The third line starts with "from," so the three lines read as one slow sentence-like unit. Then the white space opens and the lines shrink to "O mouth" and "O trusting life." These are the only capital letters in the poem, and "O" is the old, formal sound of odes and hymns. The cool, wry observer has become someone who speaks aloud and addresses the baby directly. The baby is first named only as a "mouth," the body part that does the work, which echoes the earlier practical tone. Then the poem widens to "life" itself. Between them comes "trusting," the first word in the poem that names a feeling. It changes everything before it. The "convenience" belonged to the one feeding. The trust belongs to the one being fed, and it is the reason the ordinary moment feels enormous. A faint sound link helps: the long *i* of "like," "white," and "life" quietly ties the dolphin image to the final word.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. Writing about nursing can slide into sentimentality or into embarrassed avoidance. Bonta does neither. He lets humor and awe stand side by side, in the same plain voice, and trusts the reader to feel the jump between them. The poem suggests that wonder doesn't have to be dressed up in grand language. It can sit inside a joke about dinner and appear only when the speaker stops describing and starts addressing the baby.