A magic trick performed for almost no audience: that is the poem's opening picture. Calling the priest's actions "sleight-of-hand" turns what is presumably the Mass into conjuring, a quick movement of the hands that asks the watcher to believe what they cannot see. The tone is deadpan rather than furious. Bonta simply reports the priest's performance "to a nearly empty cathedral" and moves on to the people who are actually there: two women in a back pew, "flanked / by three black garbage bags / containing their worldly possessions." The poem never says they are homeless, but the bags suggest it. "Worldly possessions" is a grand, old-fashioned phrase, and the poem sets it beside plastic rubbish sacks. "Flanked" is the language of bodyguards and processions, so the bags become an odd honour guard, and the women gain a small, stubborn dignity.
The only speech comes in the middle, in two lines marked with dashes instead of quotation marks and attributed to no one. "What's he saying?" asks one voice. "It doesn't matter. Wait." The question of meaning is brushed aside in four words. The next line delivers the punchline: "There will be free samples at the end." Borrowed from the vocabulary of supermarkets, the phrase makes communion sound like a promotional stall. It is funny, and it is also sad, because the women's priorities are practical and the poem doesn't scold them. Whether this is cynicism or plain realism is left open. Either way, the word "Wait" gives the poem its title and its real subject, which is endurance rather than belief.
Bonta surrounds this exchange with images of dimness and decline. The stained-glass windows, which are supposed to turn light into colour and story, are "dull / with November light." That is the shortest line in the poem, and it sags. Light is weak, the season is late, and the black bags are the strongest colour in the room.
Then the poem's attention drops from altar to floor. "Under the pew, safe from the janitor's mop, / the house spider has eaten all her children." The irony in "safe" is sharp, since the spider escapes the cleaner but not her own nature. The sentence is flat, stated like a weather report, and that flatness is what makes it chilling. Placed so soon after the priest's ritual, the line may nudge readers to think about the act of eating at the heart of the Mass, though the poem draws no explicit comparison. It just sets the two scenes side by side. Both involve consuming a body, one as symbol and one as fact. "House spider" also matters: the cathedral is a house, and something in it is quietly devouring its young.
The last two lines move to the sacristy, the back room where the priest's vessels and vestments are kept, out of the congregation's sight. There the clock is called "the sworn enemy of time," a riddling phrase. A clock measures time, yet here it is cast as time's enemy, as if counting it were a kind of war. The poem ends on "continues to tick," with no amen and no resolution, only a mechanical sound that answers the instruction to wait. Hard t-sounds in "time," "continues," "to," "tick" make the line seem to tick itself.
The form supports this. The poem runs to fourteen lines, the length of a sonnet, but it has no rhyme and no regular metre. Instead the rhythm follows speech. Sentences stop mid-line ("Wait."), and enjambment such as "flanked / by three" lets the description trail across the page. The vocabulary is plain, apart from a few startling choices like "sleight-of-hand" and "sworn enemy."
The poem is significant because it packs large questions into a small scene: what ritual gives to those who most need something, whether meaning matters when hunger is real, and how nature and time carry on beside human ceremony. It does this with dry humour and no sermon, and it leaves readers to decide whether the women are being cheated or sensibly waiting for what they came for.