Four short lines, and a piece of rotten fruit gets promoted to divinity. Dave Bonta's "Windfall" begins with something anyone might step over in an orchard or a park, "this fallen fruit", and by the last line has turned it into "my sandwich's god". The poem is about how quickly attention can turn the humblest thing into an object of reverence, and about how that reverence is tangled up with decay.
The title does a lot of the work. A windfall is literally fruit brought down by the wind, but the word also means unexpected good luck. The poem keeps both senses alive. The fruit is a loss, since it has fallen and is spoiling, yet it is also a gift that has dropped into the speaker's lap. The word "fallen" adds another layer. It is hard to read it next to "sickness" and "god" without hearing an echo of the Fall, though that is an inference from the vocabulary rather than anything the poem says outright. The fruit seems to carry mortality inside it.
The poem is built as a chain of renamings. After the colon, the fruit is called a "small heart", then something "full of sickness", then a "god". There is no verb anywhere. The speaker doesn't act or explain, only points and labels, as if holding the thing up in one hand. The colon works like an equals sign, and each phrase re-describes the same object at a different scale. "Heart" makes the fruit bodily, perhaps because of its core, perhaps because of its shape. "Sickness" turns that body unwell. "God" lifts it out of the body altogether.
The sound of the poem is as compact as its sense. The lines run roughly four, three, four and five syllables, so the last one is the longest and the poem seems to widen as it closes. There is no rhyme, but the consonants hold it together. The soft *f* sounds in "fallen fruit" and "full of" link the first and third lines. The hissing *s* runs through "small", "sickness", "sandwich's", so the middle of the poem sounds like a whisper. Then the final word, "god", ends the poem on a single heavy syllable, like a door shutting.
The most interesting choice is the possessive in that last line. The speaker doesn't say "my god" but "my sandwich's god", and the effect is comic and a little unsettling. The sandwich is the most ordinary of lunches, and now it has a deity, as if every small domestic thing had its own presiding spirit. The line can be read in several ways. Perhaps the speaker eats lunch beside the fallen fruit, which presides over the meal. Perhaps the fruit is what the sandwich, being plain and manufactured, lacks: something alive and ripening, then rotting. Perhaps the fruit is a god because its sickness draws in insects, so decay is what feeds other life. The poem doesn't choose among these, and that openness is part of its charm.
The tone is what keeps the poem from sounding pompous. A solemn poem about a divine rotten fruit would be easy to laugh at. Here the grand word "god" is attached to the humble "sandwich's", and the speaker seems to know it. The result sits between joke and prayer. It treats the sacred as something found at picnic level, among crumbs and bruised skin, and not only in churches or mountaintops.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. In a few words it holds together beauty and rot, luck and loss, the reverent and the ridiculous. It suggests that sickness is not the opposite of holiness, and that the thing we worship may be the thing already on its way back into the ground. Even the "small heart" in the second line carries that double feeling. It is tender, a little pitiful, and already ruined. The poem gives a windfall's worth of meaning for almost no words, and it leaves the reader looking more carefully at whatever lies on the grass.