Two Latin words at the top of the page, *Stabat mater*, "the mother was standing," promise something familiar. They are the opening of a well-known Christian hymn about Mary at the foot of the cross, watching her son die. Readers who know it expect a solemn scene of grief. Dave Bonta gives them a woman with an empty kitchen and a drink.
The first small shock is a preposition. The traditional mother stands *beside* the cross, a witness. Here she is "weeping / on her cross." The cross belongs to her. She is no longer watching someone else's agony but enduring her own. The poem never mentions a son, and that silence makes the mother's suffering the whole subject instead of a footnote to another person's.
The second line pair brings the sacred down to the ground. "The mother who is hungry, / not a bit of meat left / in the house" is the language of ordinary poverty. The repeated "the mother" works like a chant, as if the poem were still a liturgy, but each repetition adds a plainer detail. The line about meat is worth pausing on. It is almost entirely one-syllable words, and the slow, flat beat of "not a bit of meat left" sounds like a cupboard being opened and found bare. The poem doesn't say why she is hungry. "Having / signed things to a thief" hints at an answer, though a puzzling one. Perhaps she has signed away property or money to someone who cheated her. Perhaps, judging by the Christian frame, the "thief" also quietly recalls the thieves crucified beside Jesus. Bonta leaves it open. The line break after "having" also creates a small pause in which she seems to hold the thought before the confession comes.
Formally, the whole poem is a single sentence. It is strung out in short, unrhymed lines of three to six syllables, so it reads like one long breath with no resting place for rhyme or regular meter. The sentence builds through its appositions, "the mother weeping," "the mother who is hungry," and finally "the little mother," before the dash arrives and the poem finally gives her a verb: she "is not ashamed / to drink alone." Everything before the dash is a list of afflictions, and after it comes her response.
That change in the last three lines is where the poem turns. "Little" is the surprise. It is a word of tenderness, but also of diminishment, and it shrinks the grand mater dolorosa to a person you could meet in a neighbour's kitchen. The poem seems to look at her with affection, not pity. The drink is not explained either. Read literally, it is probably alcohol, taken in private. The choice of the verb also lets a faint echo of a cup or a communion linger, though that is an inference from the religious frame, not something the poem states. What matters is the denial of shame. Traditional pictures of poverty and drinking invite judgment, and the poem refuses to supply it. Its closing word, "alone," is also its loneliest. In the old hymn, grief is shared by the whole congregation, who are invited to feel with the mother. Here the invitation is gone, and she has only herself.
What makes the poem memorable is how much it does in nine lines. It moves a canonical image of sorrow out of church and into a house with nothing in it. It also avoids the easy sentimental move. The mother is not saintly, not even prudent, and the poem loves her anyway. The effect is a quiet argument that dignity and suffering do not require a halo, and that a woman who has been robbed, is hungry, and takes a drink without apology may deserve the title *mater dolorosa* as much as the figure in the hymn.