Mardi Gras means "Fat Tuesday," the last day of feasting before Lent. Its English name, Shrove Tuesday, comes from "shrive," the old word for confessing and being forgiven. Dave Bonta's poem sets the two names side by side. The French one stands in the title, the English one opens the first line. In eighteen words it holds the party and the penance together, and what it asks for is neither confetti nor forgiveness. It asks for knives.
The first stanza addresses a "Shrove Tuesday rider." Riders appear in many settings, but the title's Mardi Gras suggests a parade, where people on floats throw trinkets down to the crowd. That is an inference, not something the poem states, but it gives the request a sharp edge. The speaker holds out a hand for "pretty knives / with agate shafts" instead of beads. The adjective "pretty" is the strange note. It is a small, almost childish word, and it sits against the blade it describes. Agate adds to the effect. It is a banded, polished stone, beautiful and cold to the touch. "Shafts" is also an unusual choice, since it makes us think of spears and arrows as much as handles. The knives are ornamental and dangerous at once, much as carnival is, with its masks and glitter on the edge of something wilder.
The second stanza turns from the rider to the whole "cold world," and the request becomes stranger and more intimate: "give me a heart to pare." The verb matters. To pare is to trim or peel, as with an apple or a fingernail. It suggests patient, careful work, not a stabbing or a wound. The knives were only the tools, and now we learn the material. Whose heart it is, the poem never says. It could be the speaker's own, trimmed back as Lent trims appetite, or someone else's, or simply a heart in the abstract, as one might hold up a fruit. That openness is part of the poem's pull. "Heart" carries feeling, courage and the literal organ, and "pare" quietly asks what would be left once the excess was cut away.
The poem is built from two imperatives. "Give me" begins both stanzas, so the whole poem sounds like a prayer or a spell, though a greedy, demanding one. The speaker does not say please. The first address is to a person on a float and the second to the world itself, so the request widens from the festive to the freezing. "Cold world" is only two words, and both fall heavily when read aloud. It feels like a door closing after the warmer, longer lines before it. The poem has no rhyme and no punctuation, and capitals appear only on "Shrove Tuesday." The lines are very short, five syllables, then five, then four, then two, then six, so the stanzas have a loose, uneven pulse. Sound does some quiet work, too. The p of "pretty" returns in "pare," linking the decorative knife to the act of cutting. The hard g of "give" and "agate" gives the language a stony click, as if the words were also carved.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unexplained. A reader could take it as a Lenten poem about self-denial, or as a darker one about wanting to be cut open, or as a wry comment on how we dress up our sharpest desires as something pretty. The poem does not choose between these readings. It sets festival and discipline, beauty and violence, abundance and cold in the same breath, and it shows that they are not as far apart as the calendar suggests. The last day of excess is also the day before the cutting back begins, and the speaker, with unusual honesty, asks for the means to do it.
For a poem this small, it is also very sure of its voice. It does not describe a parade or explain Lent. It trusts a few concrete nouns, knives, agate and a heart, to do the work, and it leaves the reader holding the blade.