Nobody expects a poem in praise of scissors to open with an amputation. Dave Bonta's "Ode to Scissors" starts by turning a household chore, cutting old jeans into shorts, into a small act of surgery: "I amputate both legs / with a pair of scissors." The verb is comically oversized for the job, and it sets the tone. The ode is an old, lofty form of praise, and here it is aimed at the least lofty object imaginable. The poem keeps its straight face while the humor and a faint unease work underneath.
What follows is less an argument than a collection. Each stanza looks at scissors from a different angle, and the poem moves through the domestic, the social, the animal and the personal. First comes the speaker's wry confession that he has been cut by "paper, / grass blades, / even ... certain sharp words, / but never with scissors." The list slides from the physical to the verbal, so "sharp" starts to mean more than one thing, and the safest-seeming sharp object turns out to be the one that never hurt him. Then comes the stanza of domestic inventory, with scissors by the string, with the craft paper, in the sewing cabinet among the thread. The speaker concludes, "We are rich." That joke about abundance is also a quiet truth. Wealth, for most households, is a drawer or shelf of things that reliably work.
Bonta's language is plain and conversational. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only short lines that follow the rhythm of speech, plus the casual ampersand, which makes the poem feel like a notebook jotting. The line breaks do real work, though. In the raccoon stanza the animal is delighted to find "a shiny orphaned half / of a pair of scissors." The line stops after "half," so the phrase is cut in two, just as the object has been. The word "pair" recurs throughout the poem (a pair of jeans, three pairs, a left-handed pair), and it keeps pointing at the object's doubleness: two blades, two legs, two hands, two halves. "Orphaned" is the tenderest word in the poem. It treats a lost blade as something bereaved, and it makes a raccoon's good luck faintly sad.
The two childhood stanzas are the funniest and the sharpest. Rock-paper-scissors becomes a lesson in "the balance of powers," a civics joke that also notices something real: the scissors hand is a "peace-sign," a gesture of friendliness that stands for a blade. The mothers who worry about "a left-handed pair" are mocked gently, since the fear is oddly specific, but it shows how an ordinary tool carries inherited anxiety. Then the poem turns personal. The speaker arrives at school in glasses for the first time, and the other kids "show me what I look like / by peering through the handles of their scissors." Two loops of plastic or metal become mock spectacles. The scene is only mildly cruel, but it shows how a child learns his own appearance from other children's mimicry. Here the tool is no longer a blade at all. It is a mirror held up by classmates.
The ending is the most open part. "I'm walking as quickly as I can, / stiff-legged, / mindful of the scissors." Read plainly, this is the adult version of the old rule about never running with scissors. The speaker is carrying a pair and hurrying carefully. But "stiff-legged" also echoes the opening, where legs were cut off, and I read that as the poem folding back on itself, with the walker briefly taking on the shape of the scissors, two stiff legs hinged together. That is an inference, but the poem's attention to pairs and halves makes it a natural one.
The poem matters because of this mixture of comedy and attention. It never lectures, and it never claims scissors are secretly profound. It simply gathers enough small scenes that the object starts to stand for a whole shared life, with its thrift, its games, its worries and its small humiliations. By the end, a tool that seemed too ordinary for an ode has earned one, partly because the poet has trusted the reader to laugh first and notice later.