Few poems open by comparing a body part to a cured pork leg, and fewer still make the comparison tender. Dave Bonta's "Cured" is only four lines long, but its first line is hard to shake: "poor hand like a hanging ham." The hand is slack, heavy and faintly dead, dangling from the wrist the way a salted leg dangles from a hook. The speaker's attitude shows in the first word. "Poor" can mean pitiable, as in "poor thing," and it can mean badly supplied, as in a poor hand of cards. Both senses fit. The hand is an object of rueful sympathy, and it is also a bad deal the speaker has been dealt.
The second line widens the scene. "I carry to any enemy or love": the verb is "carry," not "offer" or "hold out," as though the hand were a parcel the speaker must haul around and deliver. The destinations are strikingly indiscriminate. "Enemy" and "love" are joined by a casual "or," and the grammar ranks neither above the other. Hands are what we use to shake, strike and caress, yet this one arrives at every encounter unchanged. One reading is that the speaker is numb and cannot feel the difference between hostility and affection. Another is humbler: whoever stands in front of him, this clumsy thing is all he has to give. The lack of punctuation, capitals and full stop helps either reading. The line slides out without ceremony, like a confession mumbled.
Then the poem turns, and the turn is an imperative: "see how it hopes to change." Suddenly there is a listener being asked to look, and the hand has an inner life. It no longer just hangs; it hopes. The poem does not say the hand has changed, only that it wants to. The last line gives that hope a shape: the hand will "grow clear as a promise." "Clear" is a surprising word to follow "ham." Meat is opaque and heavy, while a promise weighs nothing and cannot be seen, yet hands are exactly what we use to seal one. The simile imagines dead weight turning transparent and honest, something you could see straight through. "Clear" also has a medical ring, like a diagnosis or a complexion coming up clear, which leads back to the title.
That title carries the poem's double meaning. Cured ham is flesh kept from rotting by salt and drying, which is survival of a kind but not life. Cured of an illness is the opposite, a return to health. The four lines slide from the first sense to the second. The title is in the past tense, though, while the hope in the final couplet looks forward. That gap between a declared cure and an unfinished change keeps the poem from sentimentality. The speaker does not claim to be healed, only to be leaning that way.
The sound work is quiet but deliberate. The first line clots with short, flat sounds: "hand," "hanging" and "ham" share an opening *h* and the same blunt *a*. "How" and "hopes" carry that *h* into the second couplet, which suggests that hope grows from the same material as the hand. Then the vowels open up in "change," "grow" and "clear," long and airy where the first line was clunky. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter. The form is free verse in two unpunctuated couplets, and the lines run roughly seven syllables, eleven, six, seven. The long second line, with its "carry," feels like effort, and the shorter lines after it feel lighter.
The poem is significant because it does so much in so little space. It admits awkwardness and bodily shame, with a self-deprecating humor that is almost funny, and then lets that humor give way to something more exposed. It never insists on its hope. It asks us only to "see," and so it makes us witnesses to a small, uncertain change. For a reader learning how poems work, it shows how one unexpected comparison can hold a whole emotional situation, and how a title can add a second voice that complicates the first.