Sixteen words and a one-word title: Dave Bonta's "Suchness" is small enough to memorise on a single walk to the bus stop, yet it makes a whole argument. The title borrows a term from Buddhist thought for things as they really are, before we pile our opinions on top of them. The poem doesn't explain that idea. It shows it, and then, with a shrug, signs its name to it.
The first line sets up a scene that sounds enormous: "Organs play for the moss in the garden." Organs suggest cathedral sound, big and solemn. Their audience is moss, the quietest and lowest of plants, which can neither applaud nor leave. The grammar adds to the oddity, because "Organs play" has no player. The music simply happens. Judging by the word alone, "organs" could also mean the body's organs, in which case heartbeat and breath become the concert. The poem never says which, and both readings serve it, since either way something grand is being offered to something humble without anyone expecting a reward.
The second line sharpens the contrast. "The great beauty" arrives with a definite article, almost like an allegorical figure or the name of a character in a fable. We expect her to do something worthy of the title. Instead she "walks to cook." The verbs are plain and the words are short, and the hard k sounds of "walks" and "cook" clip the line off like a knife on a chopping board. The line also feels abrupt because of the way it lengthens the action. She isn't cooking yet; she is on her way, caught in the ordinary moment before a chore. Beauty here is not posed or admired. It is busy.
The poem's shape matters as much as its images. There is no rhyme, but the lines shrink: roughly ten syllables, then seven, then two. It is like watching something grand be set down piece by piece until only a small, plain remainder is left. A quiet echo links the first and last lines, since "garden" and "Zen" share their closing sound. That faint chime ties the outdoor scene to the final declaration without making it sound neat or sing-song. The colon at the end of line two does the heaviest work. It turns everything before it into evidence, as if the poem were saying: here is the proof, and here is what it proves.
What it proves is "my Zen," and that small possessive is the funniest and most interesting choice in the poem. Zen is a word people often use grandly, as though it belonged to mountain monasteries and perfect calm. Bonta's speaker shrinks it to something personal and domestic. Nothing else in the poem uses the vocabulary of spirituality: no emptiness, no silence, no bell. There is only music for moss and someone heading to the kitchen. The familiar idea that awakening can be found in everyday chores sits underneath the lines, but the poem has enough humour not to preach it. "My Zen" can sound modest and cheeky at once, as if the speaker were admitting that this is the only kind they manage, and perhaps the only kind there is.
The poem is significant for how much it asks of such a tiny space. It resembles a haiku in its brevity and its attention to a garden, but it doesn't follow any strict syllable pattern, and it ends with a personal voice rather than a detached image. It also quietly overturns a ranking we usually take for granted. We tend to treat the organ music as the event and the cooking as the interruption. Here they share the same level of attention, and the cooking may even get the last word. A reader who finishes the poem may find the line between concert and chore harder to draw, which is exactly what its title promised.