Directions are usually dull, but the ones in this tiny poem lead somewhere unexpected: the way to a lady's bed, we are told, runs through a pasty. Its central idea is that appetite and desire are close relatives, perhaps one hunger in two outfits. The title, "Food lovers," holds both meanings at once, people who love food and people whose love is made of food, and the six lines that follow never choose between them.
The poem is a single sentence with a colon as its hinge. Before the colon comes the journey; after it comes the answer. The line lengths mimic the walk. "This is / the way" is two beats of two syllables each, slow and deliberate, like someone pointing. Then "to my lady's bed" stretches to five syllables, the longest line and the destination, before the poem contracts again: "a pasty full," "of fat, the moon," "in my hands." There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the poem relies on sound. "Lady's" and "pasty" share the same falling two-beat lilt and a similar vowel ending, so the refined word and the humble one quietly echo each other. The repeated "my" ("my lady's," "my hands") keeps the speaker's own body and claim in view.
The poem's humour comes from a clash of registers. "My lady" belongs to the language of courtly devotion, of poets who sighed from a distance. A pasty is a hand-held pie, working food, and "full of fat" refuses to flatter it. The speaker could have offered honey, wine or strawberries. He offers fat. Yet the bluntness is also the poem's honesty. Fat means richness, warmth, a body satisfied, and the line makes no apology. Behind the opening phrase, "This is the way," there is also the familiar saying that the way to a heart runs through the stomach. Bonta's speaker is franker and heads straight for the bed. The word "pasty" has another life as an adjective meaning pale, which the reader may hear faintly in the background, and pale is what the moon is.
The moon arrives in the last three lines, and the line breaks do delicate work there. "A pasty full / of fat, the moon": "full" and "moon" are separated by a line break, but the ear still assembles "full moon," and "fat" suggests the moon swollen and round. The comma after "fat" also creates an ambiguity. The moon may be a second name for the pasty, round, pale and glowing, held up in two hands. Or the speaker may be offering two gifts, the pie and the moon itself. Either reading works, and the poem does not settle it. The effect is a stock romantic gesture, promising someone the moon, made almost literal. The sky is lowered to the table, and the table is raised to the sky. Cheap food gains a lunar glow, and the cosmic object becomes something you can carry home.
The poem ends on "in my hands," its shortest line, and the last image is of a body offering something. The hands are open, a little humble, and full. The tone is teasing but not mocking, since the speaker seems entirely unembarrassed by the mixture of pie and moonlight. A traditional lover would gaze at the moon from afar, but this one brings it indoors.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into barely twenty words. It joins two kinds of pleasure that poetry often keeps apart, the high and ethereal (the moon, the lady) and the low and earthy (fat, a pie, a bed). It suggests they belong together, that wanting to eat and wanting to love come from the same warm, hungry place. The joke and the tenderness are the same gesture, and the poem's small size does not stop it from making that argument.