Two lines, fourteen syllables, no punctuation, no capital letters and not one finished sentence: Dave Bonta's "Buzz feeder" takes five seconds to read and much longer to put down. The poem gives us no date or setting, so everything has to come from the words themselves, and the words are very few.
Neither line has a subject or a main verb. "where to keep the tune indoors" hangs somewhere between a question and a note to self. "getting a bee to sing psalms" names a task without saying whether it succeeds. Put together, they sketch someone wondering how to hold on to a piece of outdoor music inside four walls, and the proposed method is to coax a bee into sacred song. The central idea is the pull between wanting to bring wild sound into our own space and suspecting that it can't be done. The poem never settles it. It leaves the wish open, half comic and half tender.
The title adds a puzzle. We usually think of a feeder as something filled and hung up to attract a creature, like a bird feeder. Swap the bird for a "buzz" and the object turns strange, because you can't feed a sound. Judging by the title, the two lines may be the feeder: small, sweet and set out in the hope that something will come to it.
The verse is built from small, hard-edged words. Of the twelve words in the lines, only "indoors" and "getting" run past one syllable. Each line is seven syllables long, so the two balance like a couplet even without rhyme. There is no true rhyme, but both lines end on a *z* sound, "indoors" and "psalms", which works as a faint echo. "Psalms" is the better ending, because the closing *-mz* is about as near to a hum as English consonants get. The word that names the song also ends by making a droning noise. "Sing psalms" adds hissing *s* sounds, while "bee" quietly picks up the *b* of the title's "buzz."
The rhythm helps as well. The first line moves fairly briskly, but the second ends on "sing psalms", two stressed syllables side by side that force the reader to slow down and hold the note. A bee's buzz is a single sustained tone, the same thing musicians call a drone, so the line's final slowing imitates the sound it is trying to dignify.
The verb "keep" does a lot of work. To keep a tune can mean to carry it accurately, to preserve it, or to store it, and since we also speak of keeping bees, the word touches all of those at once. Hidden in "tune indoors" is the phrase "tune in", which suggests listening and attention. The poem asks where the music can be kept, and its sound already hints at the answer: wherever someone is paying attention.
The imagery is unusual because it is almost entirely sonic. We are told nothing about the bee's colour, wings or flight. The bee is the only creature in the poem, and what matters about it is its voice. "Indoors" is the only place named, and it implies an outside the poem never shows us. That absence gives the lines a note of longing. Judging by that single word, whatever is being kept inside belongs to somewhere else.
"Psalms" is what makes the poem more than a charming oddity. Psalms are ancient sacred songs, written to be sung, and putting the word beside a bee makes a deliberate mismatch. A bee does not sing, and "getting" it to do so sounds like training a pet. Yet the leap toward holiness is real. The poem proposes that the ordinary hum of an insect might already be a kind of prayer, if only someone could arrange to hear it that way.
That is where the poem's significance lies. In two lines it joins humour and reverence, and it admits how absurd the wish to domesticate wildness is while still taking the wish seriously. One could also read it as a comment on poetry itself, since a poem is a room where a tune can be kept, though that reading is an inference rather than something the lines state. The poem keeps its own tune the way it hopes to keep the bee's, by staying small and quiet and leaving space for the sound to arrive.