Six lines, one sentence, and a whole evening that goes wrong before it begins. Dave Bonta's "Burnt offerings" describes a gathering that ought to be a party and isn't, because everything that would have made it one has been handed over to an altar. The speakers are a "we", a small group sitting down together, and the poem's central idea is that devotion has a price paid by the devout. What is given up to something higher leaves the givers with the ashes and the obligation to be cheerful anyway.
The title sets the terms. A burnt offering is something sacrificed by fire, and what fire leaves behind is ash. So when the speakers call themselves "Kings of ash", they seem to have become the leftovers of the ritual, or at least its sole inheritors. The phrase holds grandeur and ruin together. Kings imply thrones, feasts and subjects, while ash implies a kingdom of nothing. The poem never says what was burnt, and that silence is useful. We can read the "we" as people who watched an offering burn, or as the offering itself.
The syntax adds to the effect. "Kings of ash, we are" is inverted, with the verb pushed to the end like a line from a liturgy or a proclamation. The next line then lets the air out: "an evening company." The words are modest and almost domestic, the language of an invitation list. "Company" is a pleasantly slippery word, since it can mean dinner guests, a theatrical troupe, or simply being together. "Evening" brings dusk, the end of the working day and a time when merriment is expected. Judging by the imagery, there may also be a hint of lateness in a larger sense, but the poem only suggests this.
Then comes the poem's only emotion word, and it arrives already negated: "and should have been merry." The tense is the sad one, "should have been", the grammar of an expectation that failed. The line also plays a small sonic trick. "Company" and "merry" share a soft, unstressed -y ending, a faint echo with no true rhyme (the poem is unrhymed free verse). The line ends on that light syllable and sounds almost cheerful, which sharpens the failure of the cheer it describes.
The stanza break and the word "but" make the turn. "The wine and all" ends its line on "all", which briefly sounds like a total: the wine and everything. Then "other things" arrives, deliberately vague. Bonta doesn't list the missing feast, the bread or the candles, so the loss feels bigger than any inventory could. The verb is the most interesting choice. The wine and the other things "stayed" on the altar. They weren't consumed, stolen or lost. They stayed, as though they were obedient, or stubborn, or simply forgotten there. Nobody is blamed, and the passive, almost shrugging verb leaves the speakers more resigned than angry.
The sounds of the ending quietly tie it back to the beginning. "All" and "altar" share their opening syllable, so the word that suggested everything slides into the place where everything ended up. "Altar" also gets the last word and the last beat, and the line "on the altar" closes like a door. The poem begins with the speakers and ends with the sacred object, and the shift in emphasis tells us where the evening's weight lies.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It turns the old vocabulary of sacrifice, with its kings, ash, altar and wine, into something as ordinary as a table with nothing on it. The tone is left open. The lines could be bitter about piety demanding more than it gives, dryly funny, or simply sad, and different readers will hear different things. The poem also fits many situations without naming any, including duty, grief and ambition, in which people give up the pleasures of the present for something larger and then have to sit through the evening that remains.