Four short lines and a whole arc from ambition to appetite. Dave Bonta's "Lowered expectations" can be memorised in one reading, yet its grammar keeps shifting underfoot, and that instability is where most of its meaning lives.
Take the first line: "I miss the ordnance in hope." Ordnance means military hardware, shells and artillery, which is a startling thing to attach to hope. "Miss" works two ways. It can mean to feel the absence of something, so that the speaker longs for a hope with real firepower. It can also mean to fail to hit a target, so that the speaker is a poor shot whose hope was loaded and fired and went wide. The little word "in" refuses to settle the matter. There is also a sound-link worth noticing. "Ordnance" is a near-twin of "ordinance," a word that can mean a rite or a decree, and the church waiting in the second stanza seems to answer it. Judging by the way the poem ends, the echo may be deliberate, though it is an inference. Either way, the explosive word is quietly shadowed by "ordinary."
The second line, "turn as far as the peak," has no subject and no punctuation. It could be a command, a noun (a turn in the path), or a description of a road bending up to a summit. The reader has to choose, much as a walker chooses at a fork. The phrase "as far as" matters too. It is not "to the peak" but "as far as" it, which marks a limit, the farthest point reached and no further. The peak is the climax of the poem's physical journey and also the point where the climbing stops.
Then comes the white space between the stanzas, and the poem comes down the mountain. "And so home to church / and a ham supper." "And so" pretends to be logical, as if the descent followed from the failed hope, but nothing in the first couplet actually causes it. That gap between the confident connective and the missing reason is where the poem's wry sadness sits. The verb has also vanished. Nobody says "I go home." There is only the direction, "home," as though momentum alone carries the speaker down.
The sound of the language descends as well. The first couplet is abstract and martial ("ordnance," "hope," "peak"). The second is blunt and domestic, ending on "ham supper," two soft, chewable words that sound like the food itself. The church supper is a communal, ordinary meal, the opposite of a lone summit. The lines also get smaller, ending on a short, almost humble phrase. There is no rhyme, since "hope" and "peak" don't chime, nor do "church" and "supper." That refusal of neatness suits a poem about things not landing where aimed. The nearest thing to a rhyme is subtler. "Hope" and "home" differ by a single letter, so that the first stanza's hope is swapped, almost unnoticed, for the second stanza's home.
The title adds a final turn. "Lowered expectations" is a stock phrase for settling for less, and the poem acts it out: from artillery to ham, from summit to table. But "lowered" is also what one does with a weapon. Read that way, the ordnance is not merely missed but set down, and the descent becomes a kind of disarming. Whether this is defeat or relief is never stated. The warmth of "home," "church" and "supper" keeps the ending from sounding like mockery, yet the shrunken final line keeps it from sounding triumphant.
That double vision is what makes the poem worth reading. In so few words it shows how omissions can do the work of statements. The missing subject, the missing punctuation and the missing reason behind "and so" leave the reader to supply them. And it avoids the easy moral that great hopes are foolish or that small comforts are enough. It sets the peak beside the supper table and leaves us to decide which one we would rather have reached.