Twenty-two words, no capital letters, no full stops, and yet Dave Bonta's "Divisive" holds a church, a war, a flower and a crowd of squabbling gods. Its subject is the way division gets treated as something holy. Its central idea is uncomfortable: when people split into camps, the ones who benefit are not the people but whatever they have been taught to serve. What the rest of us are left with, the poem says, is a diminished existence.
The opening couplet gives us an image with no verb to steady it: "church of war / like a mad rose." A church should stand for shelter and peace, but "of war" turns it into something that belongs to the fighting, or perhaps even worships it. The simile that follows is stranger. A rose is the traditional flower of love and beauty, and "mad" lets it run wild. It might mean overgrown and thorny, or it might mean angry, since "mad" has both senses. Judging by the imagery, the poem sees organised belief that has bloomed into something beautiful and dangerous at once. It never explains the comparison, which leaves the reader to feel its unease.
The second couplet borrows the rhythm of the familiar saying "united we stand, divided we fall." The poem swaps the expected "fall" for "gratify," and that changes everything. Division is no longer a disaster that simply happens to us. It is a service we perform. The word "only" makes the transaction shabby, because all that splitting achieves is to please "this or that god." The casual "this or that" is the cruellest touch. The gods are interchangeable, and so are the sides. The line break after "gratify" also lets the verb hang for a moment before we learn who is being pleased, as if the satisfaction were the real point.
Then the voice changes. "Give us more of the same / half-lives" is phrased like a prayer, though one with a sour edge. "More of the same" is the language of a weary complaint, so the demand sounds ironic, or perhaps like a crowd that has stopped noticing what it is asking for. The poem leaves the speaker's attitude open, and I read it as bitterness rather than approval. Everything lands on the last word, delivered by the line break: "half-lives." It means lives cut in half, lived only partly. It also echoes the scientific term for the time a radioactive substance takes to lose half its strength, a slow and lingering kind of damage. The poem never mentions anything nuclear, but the word carries that shadow. It is also the only place in the poem where punctuation appears, and the hyphen is a mark that joins. In a poem about splitting, the one piece of punctuation holds two words together.
The form works the same way. There are three couplets, each a pair of lines divided from the next by white space, so the poem is itself "divisive." It has no rhyme and no regular beat, but it does have sound. "War" returns as "more," linking the first couplet to the last, as though the church's war and the plea for more of it were one thing. The hard "d" in "divided," "mad" and "god" gives the middle of the poem a clipped, dismissive sound.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does by refusing to be specific. It names no religion, no conflict and no side, so it can fit almost any quarrel in which people are asked to choose a banner. It also asks a question that most arguments avoid: who is actually being gratified? And it ends not with a lesson but with a request for more of the harm, which leaves the reader to decide whether to join in the prayer.