Somewhere between a joke and a hymn, Dave Bonta's "Match maker" picks up one of the smallest, most disposable objects imaginable and asks it to carry a great deal of weight. On the surface the poem is about a match head, and about the speaker's decision to praise it. Underneath, the central idea is that attention can turn a throwaway thing into something worth singing about, and that this praise can end up revealing something about the singer. The title helps here. A "matchmaker" brings two parties together, and the poet does exactly that, pairing a humble object with the grand, ceremonial voice of praise-poetry.
The first couplet sets up that pairing. "I sing the head of a match" borrows the old epic habit of announcing a subject with "I sing," the same gesture that opens Virgil's *Aeneid*. But instead of arms and heroes, the subject is a speck of chemical on a stick. The word "head" is a small act of personification, since the match is given a body to be sung. Then comes the phrase "ingenious red tune," which blends senses so that a colour becomes a sound. "Red" is presumably the colour of the match head, and a flare of colour is described as music, as if the strike and the flash were one event heard and seen together. "Ingenious" quietly admires the object as a clever invention while also complimenting the tune.
The second couplet leans into the mock-grandeur. "It merits a good anthem" sounds like a committee giving its verdict, and the plain, slightly understated "good" is funnier than a grander adjective would be. Then the anthem is "sung to the trumpet." Trumpets are bright, loud and public, so the image fits a flame's sudden flaring. The sound of the line also does some work, because "sung" echoes "sing" from the opening, the same word shifted into another form, as if the promise of the first line were being kept.
Then the poem turns. The final couplet drops the public instrument and speaks directly to the flame: "o wing of my being / sweet evening prayer." The address makes the voice suddenly intimate. A flame does look like a wing, since it flickers, lifts and never stays still. But by calling it a wing "of my being," the speaker moves the match from the outside world into the self. The match head becomes an image of the speaker's own spirit, brief, combustible and bright. "Evening" gives the moment a setting, the time of day when you actually strike a match to light a lamp or candle, and the phrase "evening prayer" turns that small domestic act into a ritual. "Sweet" is the softest word in the poem, and it lands after the brass of "trumpet" like a held breath.
The form supports this movement. The poem is three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters, so it reads in a single breath. The first three lines run a little longer, at about seven syllables each, while the last three settle at around five, so the poem seems to burn down as it goes. Rhyme is replaced by quieter echoes, such as the *m* sounds of "match," "merits" and "my," and the *-ing* ending that runs through "sing," "being" and "evening." That last link is telling, because it ties the act of singing to the speaker's existence and to the time of day when the match is lit.
What makes the poem worth reading is its tonal balance. It could easily have been only a witty exercise in inflating a tiny subject, and the mock-heroic "merits a good anthem" does play for a smile. But the closing lines refuse to stay ironic. The poem starts by making a joke of ceremony and ends by actually performing one. It is also about as brief as a lit match, a flare of language that gives a quick burst of brightness and then goes out. In that sense the poem is a match itself, and the "match maker" is the poet who struck it.