Five short lines, no punctuation and no capital letters, and still Dave Bonta's "Anchored" makes a complete emotional turn. It begins with a heavy, nautical action, an anchor going down, and in the same motion a grief is let go. It ends on one of the smallest scenes a poem could choose: a man, a lobster, his wife. The central idea is a quiet paradox. We usually think of an anchor as what holds a boat in place, yet here the thing that steadies the speaker is not the weight he drops but the company he keeps. Grief goes overboard, and what remains is gladness.
The missing punctuation does much of the work. "down the anchor / let fall my grief" starts in the middle of an action, as if we have walked in on someone already at the rail. It is also unclear whether the speaker lowers the anchor and his grief together, or whether the grief simply is the anchor, something heavy that has been carried and is now released. Then, without a full stop, the poem switches to "a poor man glad to have." The reader has to supply the hinge between sorrow and gratitude. Because the poem refuses to mark the join, grief and gladness sit right beside each other, one running straight into the other.
The rhythm gives the poem its shape. The lines run roughly four, four, six, four and two syllables, so the poem swells in the middle and then sinks, much like a chain paying out. The longest line, "a poor man glad to have," piles up stresses (poor, man, glad) so that it can't be read quickly. The slowness suits a speaker counting a modest blessing. After it the lines shrink, and the break after "with" is especially effective. The preposition hangs for a moment at the end of "a lobster with," like a boat swinging on its line before it settles. Then comes the shortest line, "my wife," which is literally where the poem comes to rest. There is no rhyme, which keeps the voice plain and spoken, but there is a quiet sound-link: "grief" and "wife" both close on a breathy f, the first word of sorrow answered by the last word of comfort.
The word choices are small but carry a lot. "Let fall" is gentler than "throw" or "drop." "Let" suggests permission rather than force, and the phrase has the sound of something slipping out of us, like a tear or a confession. "Poor" works two ways: poor in money, and "poor man" in the sense of someone to be pitied, which echoes the grief in the second line. A lobster, which the poem treats as a treat, makes the first sense stronger, since the man is glad of what a richer person might take for granted. "Have" is just as flexible, meaning to own, to be given, or to eat. And "with" quietly carries the poem's whole argument, because the pleasure lies less in the lobster than in sharing it.
The title, "Anchored," completes the paradox. If the speaker has just dropped his grief like an anchor, being anchored should mean being stuck in it. The poem suggests the reverse: once the grief is down, he is held in place by something lighter, the table he shares with his wife. The imagery suggests the sea, but the poem gives no setting or reason for the sorrow, and I would not try to supply one. Even the relation between grief and wife is left open. She may be the comfort that follows the grief, or she may be part of it, with the meal a memory held onto. Either reading works, and the poem is better for not choosing.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. In under twenty words it shows that consolation often arrives as ordinary pleasure rather than as a grand answer. It trusts the reader to feel the weight of the first lines and the lightness of the last, and its shrinking shape lets us feel the relief physically, as the anchor sinks and the line settles on two syllables.