Seven short lines hold a kitchen, a dinner table, a scene of blame and a sea voyage, and Dave Bonta explains none of them. "Death of a queen" sounds like the title of an elegy or a chapter of history. What follows is closer to a riddle or a dark nursery rhyme, in which the grandest event imaginable is dragged into the household and made to sit at table.
The opening makes this clear. "A candlestick coven / over her oven" is built on a rhyme that chimes like a spell, and the word "coven" does the rest. A coven is a gathering of witches, yet the members here are candlesticks, objects huddled over an oven as if over a cauldron. The candles might suggest a vigil, a wake or a birthday cake, and the poem lets us choose. The oven, meanwhile, turns the queen into a cook. She is introduced through her kitchen, not her crown.
The third line is stranger still: "an ash and ham sandwich at table." A sandwich puts one thing between two others, and here the pairing is ash, what remains after burning, with ham, flesh meant for eating. Death and appetite are served together, and neither seems to mind. The short *a* sounds in "ash," "ham," "sandwich" and "at" crowd the line so that it sounds chewed. Notice too that the first three lines contain no verbs. Nobody does anything. The scene is a still life, with objects arranged and waiting.
Then the poem turns, and it does so with its only exclamation mark: "How much fault was laid / upon the doctor Death!" The tone is that of a gossip or a mock-outraged bystander. The verb "laid" carries several meanings at once: a table is laid, blame is laid, and the dead are laid out. The passive voice leaves it unclear who is doing the blaming. "The doctor Death" can be read two ways. It may mean that a doctor, Death's agent, is being held responsible, or that Death himself is the physician, the one doctor whose verdict cannot be appealed. Either way, there is something absurd in hunting for someone to blame when the cause was always going to be the same.
The final line gives the poem its sting: "Going to sea, the queen met her water." It echoes the familiar phrase about meeting one's maker, but swaps in "water," a similar-sounding word that is wetter and more ordinary. The substitution is funny, and it also changes the meaning. Instead of a judgment, the queen meets an element. "Water" has other possible shades too. Doctors once examined a patient's "water" as a way of diagnosing illness, and the word links the doctor of the previous lines to the sea of this one. The poem never says whether the queen drowned, sailed away, or is being carried off by a metaphor.
The sound patterns support the wordplay. There is no regular meter, and the lines run from about four syllables to nine, with the sandwich line the longest. After the early rhyme of "coven" and "oven," the poem drops full rhyme and relies on echoes. "Fault" in line four is answered by "water" in the last line, and "sea" prepares for "queen" at the start of the next line. The poem begins in a jingle and ends in something drier and more clipped, as if the song had run out of breath.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does by refusing to behave. The queen has no name, no kingdom and no history, so she becomes a figure for anyone's death, ceremonial and ridiculous at once. Bonta pairs the language of ritual (coven, candles, table, blame) with plain objects like ovens and sandwiches, and the result is neither mockery nor mourning. It suggests that people deal with death by turning it into familiar things such as meals, gossip and idioms. The poem trusts the reader to assemble the story from its fragments, and the pleasure lies in noticing how many meanings fit into so few words.