Seven short lines, one long sentence, and a corpse that refuses to stay put: Dave Bonta's "Living it up" packs a surprising amount of dread into a very small space. It opens like a prayer, "Forgive me the sins of ancestors", and what follows slowly turns that prayer into something stranger. The poem seems to be about inherited guilt and the way the past will not stay buried. Its central idea is that the dead are not distant, because they walk among us in broad daylight, and we are used to them.
The first line is already slippery. "Forgive me the sins of ancestors" could mean "pardon me for what my ancestors did," or it could be a plea to be let off from owing for those sins at all. Either way, the speaker is apologizing for something he did not do, which is how inherited guilt works. The word "ancestors" has no "my" or "the" in front of it, so the speaker's family quietly widens into ancestors in general.
Then the tone changes completely. "Good for a rare walk, in pleasant discourse / going by us in the field" sounds like a country stroll, with courteous chat and a quiet landscape. The grammar is loose, and it is hard to say what exactly is "good for a rare walk": the ancestors, the day, the field? That looseness makes the passage feel stitched together from fragments, like overheard speech or a half-remembered sentence. This is only an impression from the text, but the ambiguity does real work. The ancestors drift in and out of the sentence just as ghosts drift in and out of a landscape.
The most unsettling choice is the poem's ordinariness. The speaker says "who we often see together / in street and in house." The shift from "me" in line one to "we" and "us" here matters, because private guilt has become a communal habit. Everyone sees these figures, and no one seems alarmed. The parallel phrasing of "in street and in house" has a calm, almost liturgical rhythm, and it puts the dead in the most domestic places there are.
The final two lines deliver the shock, but quietly. These figures have "lately come back again / from being hanged and buried." Everything before it was polite, and the ending is brutal. "Lately" makes the return sound like a piece of local news, as if a neighbor had just come back from a trip, and "again" suggests this has happened many times. Hanging is punishment, and burial is supposed to be closure. The poem says neither works. The sins were paid for, at least in the world's terms, and the sinners keep returning anyway. The final word, "buried," lands with a thud, and the poem simply stops there. It has no moral and no comfort.
The formal choices support this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, so the voice stays flat and conversational, closer to someone talking than to a ceremony. The lines are short and the punctuation is spare: a couple of commas and a single full stop at the very end. Because nothing slows the sentence down, the reader moves from walk to field to street to gallows almost without noticing the drop, the way the speaker has stopped noticing how strange all this is.
The title adds a bitter joke. "Living it up" usually means enjoying life extravagantly, yet the only people "living" here are the executed, who have come back and are strolling about in pleasant discourse. The phrase can also be read as the dead living on through the living, still "up" and about when they should be down in the ground. The cheerful idiom and the grim content pull against each other, and the poem lives in that friction.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. In a handful of lines it suggests that guilt is handed down, that punishment does not settle it, and that a community can live alongside its dead without ever mentioning them. The poem does not tell us whether the ancestors are ghosts, memories, or the stubborn habits of a family and a place. It leaves the reader in the field, watching them go by.