Four lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and a whole evening in a relationship goes by. Dave Bonta's "Lovers' quarrel" is about a fight that has already run out of fuel. Its central idea, as I read it, is that the real danger between people who love each other may not be fury but fatigue. The row shrinks into a long grey afternoon and ends neither in a break nor in a reconciliation, just in a bad meal eaten together.
The first couplet sets the tone with two puzzling phrases. "Sore lovers" is a double-edged opening. "Sore" can mean bruised or aggrieved, and putting it before "lovers" makes the soreness their defining feature at this moment. Then they "play at harm." To play at something is to pretend, the way children play at war, but the thing being played at is harm, so the game is not quite innocent. The poem leaves open whether they are performing a quarrel or acting out real hurt in a halfhearted way.
"A horse of no stomach" is stranger still. After "play," the word "horse" may bring "horseplay" to mind, rough, mock-aggressive fooling, so the horse seems to stand for the quarrel itself, a creature they are riding or putting through its paces. And "no stomach" calls up the idiom of having no stomach for a fight. The quarrel is a mount without courage or belly. A reader might even catch a faint Trojan horse in it, a horse famous for its hollow middle, except that here there is nothing hidden inside at all. That last connection is my own inference, but it fits the sense of an empty threat.
The idiom matters for another reason: "stomach" also means appetite, and that meaning carries the poem into its second half. The horse has no stomach, and the couple's supper is "poor" and "thin." The word links the two couplets, so the failure of nerve and the failure of appetite become one weakness.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no end rhyme, so the lines never click shut, which suits a quarrel with no resolution. But the short, muffled "u" of "lovers," "stomach" and "supper" runs through the poem like a low hum, and "sore" and "horse" quietly chime across the first couplet. "Sore" at the start and "poor" near the end also bracket the poem with hurt and then with lack.
The line lengths show the same pattern. The first two lines are each six syllables, clipped and compact. The third stretches to nine, and the poem seems to slow down: "cold as rain talking all afternoon." The long vowels of "cold," "all," "talking" and "afternoon" drag the line out, so we feel the hours pass. The grammar is ambiguous in a useful way. Either the talk is as cold as rain, or the rain itself is talking, drumming on the roof while the couple sit and wear each other down. Either way, the word "talking" is telling. It is not shouting or arguing, only talk, as steady and unremarkable as weather. Then the final line shortens to seven syllables and mostly one-syllable words: "they try a poor thin supper." It is as thin as the meal it describes.
"Try" is the best word in that line. It means to taste, and it also means to attempt, so the supper is a tentative step toward peace as well as food. Nobody says sorry and nobody storms out. They sit down and see whether they can swallow something together. The adjectives pile up without a conjunction, "poor thin," as though the speaker were too weary to be more exact.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves out. We never learn what the quarrel is about, which suggests it no longer matters. The title borrows a stock phrase that often implies a comic, passing row, and the poem drains it of comedy without turning it into tragedy. The missing full stop leaves the supper unfinished, and we cannot know whether the couple will recover their appetite. In four short lines, Bonta shows how a quarrel can end in a quiet, anticlimactic hunger.