Nineteen words, no punctuation, and one blunt syllable that does most of the work. Dave Bonta's "Consilience" is about being lied to beautifully, and about what those lies are worth once the music stops.
The first line, "her lies sing of wheat and honey," makes the lies into performers. What they sing about is abundance. Wheat is bread and honey is sweetness, so together they suggest a promised land where everything is plentiful. The verb "sing" matters because song persuades by charm, not by proof. The line even has a lilt: "her LIES sing of WHEAT and HONey," with soft w and h sounds and the hushed s of "lies sing." The poem never says who "her" is or what she actually claimed. We get only the texture of the deception, which is appealing precisely because it is so pleasant to hear.
Then comes the drop: "and then all turd." "And then" sounds like a storyteller's hinge, the moment the listener realises how the tale ends. "All" is total, since not a grain of wheat survives. And "turd" is a short, coarse, Anglo-Saxon word, closed off by a hard t and a hard d like a door slamming. A politer word such as "excrement" would have cushioned the blow, and the poet refuses to cushion it. The imagery may also hide a grim joke. Wheat and honey are what goes in, and turd is what comes out. Judging by the imagery, the lies look like nourishment but pass straight through, leaving nothing behind.
The title reframes all this. "Consilience" is a word from the vocabulary of science and argument. It describes separate lines of evidence agreeing and pointing to the same conclusion, and its Latin roots suggest a "leaping together." Putting such a dignified word above such a crude verdict is funny, but it also seems deliberate. The speaker delivers a judgment on someone's honeyed promises as if it were a well-supported finding: examine the claims from any direction and they arrive at the same place. Read that way, the poem is a deadpan lab report. A second reading is also possible, in which sweetness and filth "leap together" inside a single sentence, and the poem lets them sit there side by side.
The second stanza changes the register. "a strange rude life there is / among them" reverses normal word order and ends the line on "there is," which sounds slightly old-fashioned, like a naturalist's field note or a remark passed down as folk wisdom. After the shock of "turd," the speaker steps back and observes with a cooler eye. "Rude" works in two ways: it can mean impolite, and it can also mean rough or unrefined. Either fits a life lived among liars. The two stressed words in "strange rude" sit side by side and slow the line, as though the speaker were looking carefully at something odd. Then the pronoun widens from the singular "her" to the plural "them." The poem does not say whether "them" means her fellow deceivers, the people who believe her, or everyone caught up in her stories. That vagueness is useful, because it turns one person's lies into a whole way of living.
The sound ties the stanzas together quietly. "Lies" in the first line is echoed by "life" in the third, as if the two words were close kin. The poem has no rhyme, no steady metre, no capital letters and no full stops, and it finishes on "among them" without closing the thought. It reads like a remark half-muttered, which suits its subject. The lies are polished and the verdict is not.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. The shift from the lovely first line to "turd" shows how a single word choice can overturn an entire mood. The odd, learned title adds a second joke, and the final couplet leaves a lingering unease about the "strange rude life" that results from listening to sweet talk. It is short enough to read in seconds, but it makes the reader ask what they do when a beautiful promise turns sour.