A day of national prayer usually calls for grand language: the country, its future, the divine. Dave Bonta's "Lines for the National Day of Prayer" answers with a chair, a picture and some rice. It is only seven lines long, yet it turns public piety upside down. Instead of asking for blessings on the nation, it asks for blessings on whatever lies around an ordinary life, including the toilet.
The shape of the poem matters. There are two three-line stanzas and then a single line left alone. Each stanza begins with the same verb, "bless", the imperative of liturgy, so the poem sounds like a litany. But nothing in it is solemn on the surface. There are no capital letters and no punctuation, and the lines are short, mostly a handful of syllables. The effect is of a prayer murmured or jotted down rather than delivered from a podium. Only the title, with its official capitals, speaks in the voice of ceremony, and the poem quietly undercuts it.
The first stanza stays at home. "Chair and picture" are furniture, "rice in the evening" is a modest meal with a time of day attached, and the stanza closes on "being ordinary". That last phrase is the only thing in it that is not an object. It is a condition, and perhaps the poem's real subject. The little word "and" at the start of the line makes it feel like an afterthought, as if the speaker is humbly adding himself to the list.
The second stanza grows stranger and darker. "Error and air" pairs a failure with something we breathe without noticing. The sounds echo each other, and "air" also rhymes with "chair" from the stanza before. It is the poem's one rhyme, tying the furniture of the first stanza to the breath of the second. To bless "error" is a bold request for a prayer, since it means accepting mistakes instead of asking to be spared them. Then comes "the company and lead", the only line with a definite article, and it is ambiguous. "Company" could be companionship or a corporation, and "lead" could be a poisonous metal or the verb meaning to guide. Each reading makes the blessing harder to give. Judging by these words, the poem is willing to include institutions and pollutants in its gratitude. The stanza ends on "shit and hole", three blunt monosyllables, exactly where a prayer would normally reach upward. It is the bottom of the descent, the body's waste and the place it goes, and the poem blesses it anyway.
The last line changes the grammar. "O state make me thankful" keeps the old vocative "o" of hymns and psalms, but it addresses the state rather than God. This can be read in several ways. It may be sincere, a citizen asking his government for a reason to be grateful. It may be ironic, mocking an official day of prayer that casts the state as the giver of blessings. And "state" may also mean a condition, as in a state of mind, so the speaker could be asking for a state of thankfulness. The poem does not choose, and it gives no "amen" to settle the matter. The verb has also changed from "bless" to "make me". After asking for blessings on the world, the speaker admits he cannot produce gratitude alone.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It takes a ritual built around the large and abstract and replaces it with the concrete and the unglamorous. It also refuses an easy pose. A purely cynical poem would sneer at the national day, and a purely pious one would flatter it. This one does something harder. It treats gratitude as a discipline that must reach as far as the sewage and the errors, and it leaves open whether the state can help or only get in the way. A reader finishes the poem looking at their own chair, their own dinner and their own plumbing, and wondering which of them they have ever thought to be thankful for.