Nine words, a title and a dash: Dave Bonta's "Ceremony" gives a solemn ritual about as much room as a baby would, which is very little. The title promises something formal, scripted and adult. What follows is a child, a christening, and sound. There is no font, no water, no gown, no priest. Everything that makes a christening look like a christening has been cut, and what remains is the part nobody can rehearse.
The grammar does a lot of the work. "A child christened" has no main verb, only a participle, so it reads like a caption or a headline. The dash after it works as a small hinge. The ritual is over in one word, and the poem turns to what comes next. The two participles also behave differently. "Christened" is finished, a completed act, while "wrangling" is still going on. The ceremony ends but the noise doesn't, and the verb forms alone suggest which of them has the stronger hold on the scene.
The word "simple" repays attention. It can mean plain, unadorned, uncomplicated, even innocent, and each of these quietly contrasts with the layered business of a church service. Notice too that the poem says "noise" and not "cry," "wail" or "voice." "Noise" is flat and a little unflattering, and it refuses to sentimentalise the baby. Yet the pronoun "her" keeps the child a person rather than a nuisance. There is also a neat irony underneath. A christening is, at heart, an act of naming, an act of language, and the person being named answers with something that comes before language. The gap between the words said over her and the sound she makes in reply is the poem's central tension.
Then comes "wrangling about," which is where the poem gets slippery. "Wrangling" suggests quarrelling, but it also suggests the handling of something unruly, as when we talk of wrangling animals. So who is doing it? It might be the baby, squirming and thrashing, or the adults fussing over who holds her, what is said and how it goes. The poem doesn't settle this. "About" could be an adverb, as in "thrashing about," or a preposition still waiting for its object, as in "wrangling about what?" The poem stops before it says. With no full stop, the line trails off, and readers are left to fill the silence with whatever they have seen at a family event, whether a name, a doctrine or a dropped bonnet.
The sound of the poem supports this looseness. The lines run to roughly four, four and five syllables, so the last one is slightly longer and spills over the pattern, a small echo of the wrangling it describes. There is no rhyme, which suits a poem about a ritual coming apart a little, because a tidy chime would bring back the neatness the content resists. The poem also begins in lowercase and never closes with punctuation, so it feels overheard rather than composed. The sounds are worth hearing too. "Child" and "christened" look alike on the page, though they sound different, and "simple noise" has a soft hiss that might pass for a hush. "Wrangling" is rougher, with a cluster of consonants that is slightly awkward to say. The word is physically a bit of a wrestle, which suits its meaning.
What makes the poem worth reading is its balance. It could easily have mocked the ceremony, or else sanctified the baby's noise as purer than any liturgy. Judging by the text, it does neither. The tone seems amused but tender, and the ritual is neither sneered at nor defended. The reader decides whether the noise interrupts the ceremony or is the most honest thing in it.
For a poem this small, that is a good deal of work. It shows how little language is needed to set an institution beside a living creature and let them disagree. It also shows that an ending can be more interesting when it stops mid-thought, because "about" leaves the reader still listening.