Few poems manage to give thanks for pain, preach a sermon and describe a hangover in fifteen lines, but "Healths" by Dave Bonta does all three, and it never quite tells us which one it means most. Its central idea seems to be that praise is something we are pushed into, by custom, by crowds, by the body itself, and that the most honest praise may come from looking at what is actually underfoot.
The poem opens with a strange motive: "in order to prevent surprise / we read like fools / only here and there a bit." Reading in scraps is a way of staying safe, since skimming means never being caught off guard. The language soon moves into the church. We are told to "give thanks for pain / or the power of a rose," and the pairing is deliberate. A rose is beautiful and also thorned, and the little word "or" makes the two seem like equal choices. Then comes "a sermon full of rope." Rope is an unsettling thing to put inside a sermon. It could suggest binding, or hanging, or the cord that friars wear at the waist, and it prepares the ground for the ants at the end. The phrase "text with one mind / and one mouth" has the ring of scripture. It echoes a line in Paul's letter to the Romans about glorifying God "with one mind and one mouth." Here, though, the unity feels less like harmony than like pressure to conform.
That pressure becomes concrete in the last stanza. The speaker walks "head aching / with the healths I was forced to drink." A "health" is a toast, and the plural makes it comic and slightly sour: the speaker has drunk to everyone's wellbeing and now feels ill. The word "forced" matters. The shared mind and mouth of the sermon turn out to be the compulsory cheer of a drinking party, and the body pays the bill. Health, the title's subject, is exactly what the speaker lacks.
Against these human rituals the poem sets another, stranger one: "give glory / to the great variety of creatures / that animate dead bodies." This is the poem's boldest turn. Normally a corpse is the end of life, but here it is a place where life goes on, crawling with the creatures that feed on it. The verb "animate" is the clever choice, because it grants the dead a kind of second liveliness. The praise is startling and a little grotesque, yet it is also sincere. If we are asked to be thankful for pain, the poem implies, we should be thankful for decay too.
Then the ants arrive, "like little friars." The simile is funny and exact. Ants move in lines, seem absorbed in their work, and are dark like a monk's habit, so they look like a procession going about its business with perfect devotion. They do what the sermon only talks about. They are united in "one mind," they need no toast, and they are quietly busy among the dead. The speaker, meanwhile, stumbles through them with a sore head, the clumsy and over-served congregation of one.
The form supports this gentle mockery. The poem is free verse in five tercets, with no rhyme and no regular beat. Lines are short and often end on small, plain words ("fools," "rose," "mouth"), so each stanza feels like a separate pronouncement that ends before we are ready. The sounds still tie things together. "Rose" and "rope" share a long o and sit in neighbouring stanzas, quietly linking beauty and punishment. In the last stanza the repeated l of "like little" and the h of "head" and "healths" give the ending a muttering, aching quality. The syntax also loosens as the poem goes on. Early lines are brisk commands, and the final stanza runs on as one long, trailing sentence, as if the speaker were slowing to a walk.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it keeps solemn and silly things side by side without picking one. Its sermon is real, and its hangover is real. It suggests that gratitude, if it is honest, has to include thorns, rot and headaches, and that the ants may be better at ritual than we are.