Five lines, twenty-two words, and almost nothing to hold onto: Dave Bonta's "Austerity measures" behaves the way its title promises. The phrase usually belongs to budgets and spending cuts, but here it shrinks to the scale of one person's week. The speaker goes to church alone, goes home, and the road to supper takes "five or six days." The central idea is that scarcity of company, shelter and food reduces a life to a bare itinerary. The poem reports this without complaint, almost with a shrug. It never says why things are this lean, and that silence is part of its dry humour.
The grammar is stranger than it first looks. We expect "a church of stone" or "a stone church," but the speaker goes "to church in a stone," as if the church were somewhere inside one hard, single object. Then comes "home to a car," where home itself is a vehicle. The prepositions are quietly crossed: church is a place you go *to*, yet it sits *in* a stone, while home is something you go "to" and turns out to be a car. Both containers are cold, hard and cramped. "Stone" is also slippery. It could mean the building's material, a gravestone, or even the old unit of weight. The poem offers no key, and that openness is deliberate, since an austere poem doesn't over-explain.
The last two lines turn distance into time. "To go five or six days to supper" measures the journey not in miles but in days, and "measures" in the title starts to pun, since a poem is also made of metrical measures. The vagueness of "five or six" matters too. The speaker isn't even sure how long the wait is, and the shrug has a faintly folk-tale, deadpan sound. Either the car must travel for days to reach a meal, or the meal is that many days away, and both readings mean hunger. Placing "church" next to "supper" may also stir an echo of communal worship and shared meals. That is an inference rather than anything stated, but if it is there, the poem withholds exactly that fellowship. The word "Alone" sits at the very start, cut off by its comma, and nobody is waiting at the table.
The sound of the poem is as spare as its sense. Almost every word is a single syllable. Only "Alone" and "supper" have two, and they bookend the poem, loneliness at one end and the delayed meal at the other. Between them runs a chain of long o sounds, in "Alone," "stone" and "home." There is no end rhyme, but the vowel echoes like a hollow bell, and it links the three words that matter most to the speaker's situation: isolation, hardness, shelter. "Went" appears twice, and the repetition makes the speaker's movements sound mechanical, like a routine rather than a choice. The word "to" shows up in every line after the first, which gives the poem a forward-leaning stride. Yet each "to" points only at a stage, such as church, car or supper, and the destination is always postponed.
The line lengths do their own rationing. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly four, five, six, six, and then three. They swell as the journey lengthens, and then the final line, "to supper," is cut short. The meal itself is the smallest portion on the page. Punctuation is minimal, just that one comma and the closing full stop, so the poem has no spare ornaments at all.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It takes a phrase from public life and tests it on a single body, a single day, a single empty plate, so that "austerity" stops being a policy and becomes a feeling. It doesn't preach or name a culprit. It trusts an odd, riddling image of a church in a stone and a home in a car to make the reader do the arithmetic. The result is funny and bleak in the same breath, and it is short enough to read again at once, which is the best way to notice how much has been left out.