Seven short lines, one pun, and a whole holiday disposed of: Dave Bonta's poem is smaller than a Christmas card and a good deal colder. Its title borrows the opening words of the familiar carol "In the Bleak Midwinter" by Christina Rossetti, a song that asks what a poor person can offer a newborn child. Bonta's speaker stands on the other side of that exchange, as someone who was meant to receive and didn't. The poem never says why. It gives no cause, no family, no scene, and the reader has to work with what is left: a person, a dark night, and a wish to get the season over with.
The first sentence carries the poem's central idea in two lines. "Morning is a present / I did not receive." The word "present" is doing double duty. It is the gift under the tree, and it is also the present moment, the time we are living in. Christmas morning is traditionally when the two meanings meet, since gifts are opened and the day begins. Here both are refused, or at least missed. Notice, too, that the speaker is passive: morning is something that might have been handed over, and no one handed it over. The flat, almost bureaucratic "did not receive" sounds like a note about a parcel that never arrived, which makes the loss sharper because nobody is making a fuss about it.
Then the grammar changes direction. The second sentence runs across five lines and is full of verbs of action: "I chose," "made," and finally "was rid." The speaker supplies a substitute for the missing gift, "a pair / of candlesticks." Candlesticks are old-fashioned, modest objects that hold light without being the light, and the speaker chose them, which is a small act of control. Even so, no flame is mentioned. The poem gives us the holders and leaves out what they should hold, so the gift may be as empty as the morning was.
The next image is stranger. The speaker "made / a well in the night." A well is a hole dug downward, a place where you go looking for something below the surface, and the poem sets it against the night rather than against any daylight. Judging by the imagery, it suggests a private, inward kind of sustenance, or a depth the speaker retreats into while everyone else is celebrating. The word could also bring to mind the pool that forms in a burning candle, which would tie it back to the candlesticks, though that is a reading rather than something the poem states. The line break helps here. "Made" is left stranded at the end of a line, so we hesitate over what could be made at all before "a well" arrives.
The sound of the poem is as plain as its subject. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, and the lines stay short, mostly four to six syllables, so the poem moves in small, careful steps. The hard "k" sound in "candlesticks" and "Christmas" connects the chosen object to the thing the speaker wants to be free of. The short "i" of "did" is echoed in "rid" and again inside "Christmas," as if the ending were quietly closing a loop begun in the second line.
That ending is the most interesting part. "And so was rid / of another Christmas." "Rid" is a word for pests and burdens, not for celebrations, and "another" implies that this has happened before and will happen again. The tone is hard to pin down. It could be relief, bitterness, or exhaustion, and the poem never decides. The speaker has not found comfort the way the carol's singer finds it in giving a heart. They have simply made it through the night and come out the other side.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds back. Most writing about Christmas offers warmth or, if it rebels, loud irony. Bonta offers a dry, almost whispered report from someone for whom the season is something to get through. By setting this against a title that remembers a more hopeful song, the poem speaks for people who hear the carols and feel left out, and it does so in under thirty words.