Dave Bonta's "Rite" is only five lines long, but it treats a moment after lovemaking as if it were a ceremony. The scene is simple: two people lying still, one on top of the other, quiet and content. The poem's trick is to dress that ordinary tenderness in the language of church, tomb and communion, until the bedroom starts to feel like a sanctuary. Its central idea seems to be that intimacy, once it has been practised and tested, becomes a kind of sacred ritual, with stillness, hush and shared nourishment in place of grand gestures.
The word that does the most work is "effigies." Effigies are carved figures, the kind that lie on tombs with their hands folded and their faces calm. Calling the lovers effigies freezes them. They are no longer two restless bodies but a single stone image, and the dash before the word works like a drop into stillness. The comparison brings death in quietly, but it doesn't spoil the mood. The lovers are spent, motionless and peaceful, and the poem seems to suggest that this stillness has its own dignity. The phrase "she on me" also fits the image, because the two bodies lie pressed together like one sculpture.
Then the poem contradicts itself. Effigies cannot speak, yet these ones are "making a great whispering." The phrase is an oxymoron, since a whisper is by definition small, and "great" makes it feel enormous, perhaps because the whispering fills the quiet room, or because so much tenderness is packed into so little sound. The sounds of the words do the same thing. The soft *s* and *sh* in "effigies," "whispering," "satisfied," "hushed" and "sup" make the lines hiss gently, so the reader's own mouth ends up whispering. When the whispering stops, the poem says so in a word that sounds like what it describes: "hushed."
The poem also shrinks as it goes. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly nine, seven, six, five, five, so the poem seems to breathe out and settle. There is no rhyme to tie it off, which suits the mood, because nothing here is performed or neatly wrapped up. But a long *i* sound runs underneath: "lie," "effigies," "satisfied," "vice." The echo is faint, yet it links the lying-down at the start to the vice near the end.
"Vice-tested" is the strangest phrase, and it is probably meant to be. The most natural reading is "tested by vice," in the way we say something is "tried and tested," so the couple has been proved by temptation, failing or wrongdoing and has come through. The phrase could also hint at a vice, the clamp that squeezes, though that is more of a guess. Either way, the word insists that this peace was not easy. The lovers are not innocent. Their contentment has weight because it has been under pressure.
The last two lines complete the ritual. "Sup" is an old, slightly formal word for eating a light evening meal, and next to the title and the effigies it has a faintly communal, even communion-like ring. This is an inference from the poem's overall vocabulary, not something it states. The final image, "in the master bed," then sets this quiet feast in the most domestic place imaginable. "Master" suggests the main bedroom of a house, and the word may suggest a long shared life, though the poem gives no certain details. It also carries a slight echo of authority, as though the bed were the place where the couple's own private rule applies.
The title ties everything together. "Rite" names a ceremony, but it sounds just like "right," and it is only one letter away from "write." Whether or not the sound-play is deliberate, it suits a poem that sets the sacred and the bodily side by side without apologising for either.
What makes "Rite" worth reading is how much it does with so little. In barely two dozen words it avoids both embarrassment and crudeness, and gives physical closeness the seriousness usually kept for religion. It also makes a calm, slightly unsettling point: that the stillness of the dead and the stillness of lovers can look the same, and that only the whispering shows which one is alive.