A storm with teeth will want something to chew on, and in Dave Bonta's poem it has to settle for a noise at the edge of an ordinary evening. The poem is only three lines and thirteen syllables long. Ice clatters somewhere outside, and "we" carry on eating supper while the news plays. Nothing dramatic happens, and the poem is built on that gap between the commotion in the weather and the calm at the table.
The title does a lot of the work, because the poem itself never uses the word "storm." Without "Teeth of the storm," a reader might not know whether the ice is hail, sleet or something else, or even that it is menacing. The title supplies the metaphor, and the body of the poem then quietly justifies it. Teeth belong to eating, and the next thing we read is "as we eat." Two kinds of chewing are happening at once: the storm gnashing at the world outside, and the household working through its meal. The poem never says the two are connected, but the pairing makes the reader feel the parallel.
The word "din" is well chosen. It means a loud, continuous, tangled noise, the sound of many small impacts blurring into one. It suits ice, which in a hailstorm arrives as countless separate strikes. Then comes "busy," a surprising word to hang on a noise. It makes the ice sound like a person with a job to do, and because the poem has no punctuation, the grammar stays loose. Is the din busy *as we eat*, meaning at the same moment? Or is it busy *the way we are* when we eat? Both readings work, and both turn the storm into a fellow diner, occupied with its own hungry business just beyond the wall.
The stanza break is the poem's most important structural decision. "Eat" ends the second line, and the reader expects an object, but a blank space intervenes first. When the answer comes, it is "supper and news." The pairing is a quiet piece of wit. We can eat supper, but "eat news" only works as a figure of speech, and the poem asks us to accept that without comment. The plain little "and" gives the two things equal weight, as if taking in the day's events were just another course. The poem never says what the news contains. Judging by the title and the clatter, though, it is easy to imagine that other storms, more distant and more abstract, are arriving through the same room. The ice outside is loud but local, while the news is quiet and enormous. The poem leaves us to notice which of them is actually getting our attention.
The sound and rhythm support this restraint. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and everything is in lowercase, so the poem sounds like overheard speech more than like a performance. The lines run four, five and four syllables, and the final line is a stressed little beat: "SUP-per and NEWS." Hissing consonants run through it, in "ice," "busy," "as," "supper" and "news," like sleet against glass, so that the sound of the weather seeps into the words about the meal. The short vowel of "din" returns in "busy," a small echo inside the noise.
The poem matters because it is so small and still holds a whole situation. It catches a very recognisable modern moment: shelter, food, a screen or radio, and the world's disturbances coming through at a safe distance. It doesn't scold us for being comfortable or for half-listening, and it doesn't pretend that the storm is anything more than a sound. It sets the pieces side by side, the teeth, the meal and the headlines, and leaves the reader to feel the faint unease in that arrangement. After thirteen syllables the poem simply stops, as a lull in the conversation might, and the ice is still audible.