Five short lines are enough to found a religion, describe its service and convert the speaker. "Church of sloth" opens in the calm tone of a postcard, "A simple church", and ends on a punchline that turns out to be more than a joke: "and pray to Bed."
The title sets up a paradox. Sloth is one of the traditional seven deadly sins, so a church built to honor it is a place of worship devoted to a vice. The poem then shows what that worship might look like. "Men in hats blessing / without waking" is deliberately slippery. The grammar lets "without waking" attach to the men, so they bless in their sleep, or the blessing is so mechanical it needs no consciousness at all. It could also mean that the blessing wakes no one. The hats are just as vague. They might be ceremonial headgear or the ordinary hats of a congregation, and either way the men are reduced to anonymous silhouettes. Judging by the imagery, the poem sees ritual that carries on after the spirit has dozed off. Yet the tone isn't a sneer. "Simple" sounds almost fond, and the scene feels like a drowsy pew rather than a scandal.
The line breaks do much of the work. "Blessing" ends its line and, for a moment, stands as a complete and generous act. Then "without waking" drains it of energy. The two lines also echo each other through their matching "-ing" endings, a soft double chime like a head nodding twice.
There is no rhyme and almost no punctuation, only a colon after "church" and a final full stop. The rhythm is a see-saw: by my count the lines run four, five, four, five and four syllables. That gentle alternation feels like breathing, or like someone slowly losing the battle to stay upright. Nothing in the poem hurries, and the form does not either.
The turn comes in line four, when the speaker steps out of the audience. Until then the poem observes the men in hats. Now "I bury my pen." The verb matters. The speaker doesn't set the pen down or drop it, but buries it, as if it were a small funeral for effort. If we take the pen as the tool of a writer, and the poem invites that reading, then sloth is being confessed in the most professional terms available: the guilty feeling of the person who should be working. The poem turns that guilt into devotion.
The sound patterns tie the pieces together. The short "e" in "men", "pen" and "Bed" links the sleepy congregation, the abandoned tool and the final god, as if they all belong to one family. The soft "b" of "blessing", "bury" and "Bed" cushions the whole poem, like pillows muffling noise. And "Bed" is the only capitalized word in the poem that grammar doesn't demand, because "I" and the opening "A" would be capitalized anyway. That capital turns a piece of furniture into a deity. The drop from "pray" to "Bed" is pure bathos, a swerve from the sacred to the domestic. It is also funny because Bed is the one altar everyone already knows how to find. Even "pray" is the only real action in a poem about not acting, so the speaker's single effort goes into surrender.
There is a nice irony hiding in the poem's existence. The speaker has buried the pen, yet here are five carefully balanced lines. Either this is the last thing written before the burial, or the sloth is a performance requiring plenty of craft. Laziness is being celebrated with considerable energy.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so small a space. It mocks empty ritual, the kind of routine that carries on after belief has gone quiet. It also laughs at the writer's own idleness, and it makes the laugh feel true to anyone who has ever gone through the motions. Its central idea is that sloth is not just an absence of effort but a kind of faith, with its own sanctuary, its own blessing and its own prayer. The poem leaves us unsure whether the speaker is sinning or simply being honest, and the pleasure lies in that doubt.