Grief tends to attract big words: loss, sorrow, anguish, devastation. Dave Bonta's "Grieving" goes the other way. In seventeen words and five lines, it sets a "great grief" beside the most ordinary of things, an evening meal, and then lets the whole feeling shrink. The poem gives no name for the person or thing lost and no occasion for the mourning. All we have is the speaker's sense of what grief is like: plain, coarse, and unlikely to lead anywhere impressive.
The first line promises scale. "My great grief" is stately, with a possessive "my" and an alliterating pair, *great grief*, that sounds almost like a title. The second line then pulls the rug out: the grief "is an insufferably simple supper." Supper is domestic and small, the meal at the day's end. The adjectives matter here. "Simple" suggests bare food, nothing rich or consoling. "Insufferably" is the most surprising word in the poem. Normally we find complicated things hard to bear, but here the simplicity itself is what can't be endured. Grief offers no puzzle to solve and no drama to perform. It just sits there on the table, and you have to get through it. The word is also five syllables long, so the line seems to drag itself out, as if the speaker were chewing slowly.
The next image changes scale again. Grief is "a rough kingdom," and the size swings from a single meal to a whole realm. But this kingdom is not splendid. "Rough" suggests uncut stone, coarse cloth, uneven ground. A kingdom implies something you rule or at least live inside, so the phrase hints that grief becomes a territory, a place with its own hard terrain. The poem puts a table and a country side by side without explanation and trusts the reader to feel how both are true: grief is intimate and daily, and also something that surrounds you.
The sound of the poem reinforces this plainness. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, just free verse with a single comma and two full stops. But the vowels do quiet work. The dull, low "uh" sound runs through *supper*, *rough*, *come*, and *much*, so the poem keeps landing on the same flat note. Even the soft hissing of "insufferably simple supper" feels like muttering under the breath. Nothing here sings, and that seems deliberate.
The ending is where the poem gets its sting. "It will not come / to much" uses an everyday idiom, meaning that something won't amount to anything. Read that way, the speaker is deflating their own grief: it won't produce wisdom, a grand elegy, or a transformation. The line break makes the point physically. "To much" is the shortest line, only two words, and the poem literally dwindles away. There may also be an echo worth noticing. A "kingdom" followed shortly by "come" brings to mind the familiar phrase "thy kingdom come," and a supper can suggest sacred meals. The poem never says this, so it is only a possibility, but if the echo is meant, the religious promise of something arriving is denied. This kingdom will not come to anything much.
What makes the poem significant is its honesty about grief's lack of glamour. Many poems about loss reach for consolation, a lesson, or a redemptive image at the end. This one declines all three. It treats grief as something stubbornly ordinary, to be sat with and swallowed without ceremony. The humility of that stance is moving in itself.
There is also a gentle paradox. The speaker insists the grief will not come to much, yet the poem itself comes to something. In a few words it captures a feeling most readers will recognize: the flat, unglamorous heaviness of loss that is "great" to the one who carries it, even if it looks small from outside. By being so small itself, the poem proves how much can be said without raising its voice.