Six short lines, no full stops, and a plural title that seems to promise more comfort than the poem hands over. Dave Bonta's "Consolations" is about the moment a person realizes that the despair they settled into was less a fact than a decision, and that the world has been offering something else all along.
The first stanza is a confession. "I chose for myself / the falseness of a void." The verb matters. "Chose" makes the speaker responsible, and "for myself" tightens the sense of a private arrangement, like a room furnished by hand. Then comes the odd phrase "the falseness of a void." A void seems like the one thing that can't be false, since it is simply absence. Calling it false admits that the emptiness was built, a pose or a story the speaker told. Two readings sit side by side. The speaker may have chosen a void that was untrue, a numbness passing itself off as truth. Or the speaker may have chosen falseness itself, preferring a fiction of nothingness to the something that was actually there. The poem doesn't settle this, and it never says what prompted the choice. That silence is useful, because with no particular loss named, readers can bring their own.
The second stanza begins with a lowercase "but," as if the thought were continuing and perception had cut across it. What follows is three statements, each with a different grammar of consolation. "The sun is good" is flat and almost childlike, made of plain one-syllable words. "Good" is the most unadorned approving word there is, and the sentence has the ring of a verdict. I'd suggest it recalls the way creation stories pronounce things good, though the poem never says so. "Nature is no creed" is a negation, and it can be read two ways. It may be a relief: you need not believe anything to receive the sun. It may also be a caution: nature will not hand you a doctrine or a ready-made meaning to lean on. Either way, the speaker accepts comfort without dogma.
The last two lines carry the poem's real turn. "And grief runs / through many." The line break leaves "runs" hanging for a moment, and it can suggest water, a current, a vein through rock, or a trait passing through a family. Then "through many" widens the frame without counting anyone. The void was a private fiction, but grief is common property. The poem's pronouns show the shift. The first stanza is all "I" and "myself," and the second has no "I" at all. The speaker steps out of the self, and that move may be the most consoling thing in the poem.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, but the lines fall into pairs of roughly five and six syllables ("I chose for myself," "the falseness of a void," "but the sun is good," "and nature is no creed"). Then the poem drops to two lines of three syllables each, so it narrows to a murmur just as it widens in meaning. The repeated "and" at the start of the last two statements gives a patient, additive rhythm, the way consolations tend to arrive, one small thing after another. There is also a quiet sound-link between "creed" and "grief." They share the same long vowel, so the line about belief and the line about sorrow chime faintly, as if the two were related.
The poem is significant for what it refuses. It does not pretend the void was real, and it does not offer religion, or a grand cure, in its place. Its consolations are the sun, a nature that asks for no faith, and the knowledge that others grieve too. The title's plural is therefore a little ironic, since these comforts are small. But the poem argues that small ones are enough to begin with. The missing final punctuation helps. Grief "runs" and the sentence runs on with it, and the poem leaves the reader in the open air rather than a sealed room.