A table is about the least dramatic subject a poet could pick, which is why Dave Bonta's five lines land as hard as they do. The poem follows one household object from usefulness to abandonment, then turns on the speaker, who admits he has been afraid of the wrong thing. The central idea is that the great destroyer is not catastrophe but inattention. Things don't need to be bombed to be lost. They only need to be left alone.
The title does much of the work. "Sic transit" is the opening of the Latin saying "sic transit gloria mundi," roughly "so passes the glory of the world." Traditionally the phrase belongs to crowns, empires and conquerors. Bonta gives it to a table, and the poem quietly redefines "glory" as something humbler. The table is "a plain thing of perfect service." The two adjectives pull against each other. "Plain" admits there is nothing impressive about it, while "perfect" says it did its job without flaw. Its glory is that nobody had to notice it. That is also its weakness, because a thing that works perfectly invites us to stop paying attention.
The construction is spare. Five short lines, with no rhyme at the ends, run about six, eight, five, six and five syllables. That loosely recalls the compact shape of the Japanese tanka without keeping to its count, and it suits a poem about shrinking away. The syntax is worth watching. The sentence opens with "the table," and two dashes hold the reader in suspense while we are told what kind of object it is. The verb only arrives in line three: "fell into neglect." After two lines of calm description, the fall comes quickly and with no warning, the way neglect usually does.
Sound ties the ideas together. "Perfect" and "neglect" share an ending, so the table's quality and its fate are linked in the ear before the mind has finished with them. "All alone" has soft, drawn-out vowels and liquid consonants that make the line sound as empty as it describes. Then "alone" returns, in a sense, in the long *o* of "go" in line four. The word "fell" is also worth a second look. We hear it most often in phrases about soldiers, "the fallen," and "service" has a military ring too. Once the final line names war, those earlier words seem to have been pointing there all along. This is an inference, but the poem's vocabulary makes it hard to avoid.
The ending changes the poem's mood. Up to line three, the voice is that of an observer. Then it becomes personal: "Ignorant how things go, / I fear war, not time." The tense shifts from the table's past ("fell") to the speaker's present ("I fear"), as though he has just understood something. The grammar is slightly ambiguous. Does he fear war because he doesn't understand how things really go? Or is he admitting that his fear has been aimed at the wrong target? Both readings point to the same irony. War is loud, visible and easy to dread, while time and neglect do their work in silence. The table has already been lost without any enemy at all. The speaker's dread of large disasters has kept him from seeing the small ruin in front of him.
The last line is also very short, and "time" is its final word, with no comma or punctuation to soften it. The poem doesn't explain or console. It simply leaves time as the last thing standing, which is what time always is.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It takes an old theme, the passing of worldly things, and moves it from the throne room to the kitchen or the corner of a room. It also turns the theme on the speaker himself, who is honest enough to admit his blind spot instead of lecturing us. A reader finishes the poem and glances at the nearest ordinary, uncomplaining object, wondering when it was last really noticed.