Say "opportunity" aloud and it sounds important: five syllables of polish, the word on a conference slide or in a cheerful email. Dave Bonta's "Work song" opens by borrowing that voice. "business comes expressed / as opportunity" is how commerce talks about itself, turning whatever it wants from us into a gift. By the end of six short lines, the poem has taken that language apart and set something older and plainer in its place.
The hinge is a single-letter swap: "so that the sum is / no more than the sun dressed." A sum is what accountants arrive at, a total. A sun is what farmers wake to. The two words differ only by an m and an n, and the poem treats that tiny gap as the gap between a balance sheet and the world it comes from. The claim is that all the calculating, once you subtract the jargon, comes to no more than daylight on the ground. The phrase "no more than" can be read two ways. It can be deflating, as in "business is only this." It can also be quietly reverent, since daylight on a field is hardly nothing.
The poem's wordplay keeps working in this double way. "Expressed" can mean stated, as in a feeling put into words. It can also mean squeezed out, like juice from fruit, or sent by express delivery. Each meaning fits business: it talks, it extracts, it hurries. Then "expressed" returns as a rhyme in "dressed," the last word of the second couplet, and the echo pulls the clothing metaphor out of it. Business arrives dressed up as opportunity, and the sun ends up dressed in something far humbler: "field dust / laid by a little rain." The same sound is worn in two different outfits, a suit in the first couplet and work clothes in the last.
That last image is the most carefully chosen. To "lay the dust" is an old, ordinary phrase for what a light shower does on a dry road or field, settling the grit so it stops rising. Bonta lets the idiom keep its double life. "Laid" is also what a table is when it is set for a meal, and it is what is done to something put to rest. The rain is "a little" one, so even the blessing is modest. The scene suggests a farm field at the end of a dry spell, and one can only infer that, but the details give a convincing picture: heat, grit, a small mercy of water, and the sun seen through the haze the dust has made.
Sound and shape carry the argument too. The poem is three couplets in lower-case free verse, with no punctuation and no fixed meter. The first couplet is crowded with long Latinate words (business, expressed, opportunity), and the rest is nearly all short, plain ones: sum, sun, field, dust, rain. The language itself seems to get closer to the ground. The line "so that the sum is" ends on the weakest possible word, "is," so the reader is left hanging for a moment before the answer arrives. The stanza break after "dressed" adds another small delay before "in field dust" lands, as if the sentence were setting its load down. A soft s-sound runs through the whole poem (business, expressed, so, sum, is, sun, dressed, dust), which gives it a hushed, almost whispered quality.
That hush is part of the joke in the title. Work songs are traditionally chanted or sung to keep labourers moving together, with a beat you could swing a tool to. This one has no beat to speak of. Judging by the poem's turn, the real work song is not the corporate phrase at the start but the quieter rhythm of sun, dust and rain underneath it, which was there before anyone had a word for "opportunity."
What makes the poem worth reading is its economy. In thirty-odd words it makes a small argument about language and value without raising its voice. It does not lecture against business. It lets one near-rhyme (sum and sun) and one repeated sound (expressed and dressed) do the work, and it leaves readers to decide whether "no more than" is a put-down or a compliment. Poems this short often seem slight, but this one rewards rereading, because each pass turns up another way the words are dressed.