A pigeon is an unlikely judge of holiness, and that is where Dave Bonta's poem gets its charge. The title and the question "What makes them holy?" suggest a temple where rats are revered, though the poem never says so. Instead of a worshipper's view, we get a bird's, perched on a roof and looking down at a feeding frenzy it has no part in.
The opening is all noise and motion. "Walls rattle like a threshing machine, / the floor heaves." The simile comes from the farm, and it makes the crowd of rats sound like a mechanical harvest, loud and relentless. The floor itself seems alive, and the first thing we learn about the pigeon is that there is "no place to land." It is shut out. That detail colours everything after it. When the rats become a "mass of mendicants," the word is pointedly religious. Mendicants are begging holy men, so the poem has already planted the idea of sanctity before the speaker questions it.
The poem's most interesting trick is that it describes rats in bird language. The pigeon watches "first / with one orange eye / & then the other," a precise picture of a bird swivelling its head, and the line break after "first" delays the second eye just as the bird does. Seen through those eyes, the rats' incisors become "outlandish beaks," studded with "egg teeth." An egg tooth is the small, temporary spike a chick uses to break out of its shell, so the rats are measured against hatchlings and found stuck there: "they show no sign they'll ever / grow feathers." The pigeon cannot imagine a creature that does not aim for flight, so it reads the rats as unfinished birds.
This leads to the strangest and best line, "To them, perhaps, / the earth is still all egg." The word "perhaps" is the poem's one moment of imaginative generosity. For a second the pigeon, or the poet behind it, wonders what the world looks like from below. The earth becomes a shell not yet broken, a place of warmth, food and enclosure. It could even be a kind of innocence, since the rats have not yet been born into the sky.
Judgment and curiosity pull against each other throughout. The pigeon's verdict, "these are thieves & nest predators," is flat and fearful, delivered with a colon as if reading a charge sheet. There is also an irony the poem never states. Pigeons are often dismissed as "rats with wings," scavengers of crumbs and scraps, so the bird's contempt looks a little like envy of a feast it cannot reach. Then the question "What makes them holy?" arrives alone on its line, with no punctuation beyond the question mark and no answer. It could be the pigeon's bafflement or ours.
The ending refuses to resolve it. The rats "drop onto their clawed / forelimbs & crawl, brown / fur against the dirt, as if / it never occurred to them to fly." "Forelimbs" is a quietly clever word, since a wing is also a forelimb and the rat's front legs sit where the pigeon's wings do. The enjambments make the crawl physical, with "brown" hanging at the line's edge before "fur" arrives. The final clause can be read as the pigeon's disdain or as something close to admiration. A creature that never wishes to leave the ground, begs, eats, and crawls could be seen as humble, and humility is a plausible meaning of holiness.
Formally the poem is a single unbroken block of free verse with no rhyme, which suits its theme of a crowd pressing together with no room. The ampersands give it a quick, jotted, observational feel. The sounds do some of the work too: the hard, clattering consonants of "rattle," "threshing," "tight-packed" and "thieves" fade into the soft, rounded "earth" and "egg."
What makes the poem worth reading is that it turns an ordinary assumption upside down. We tend to treat flight as the natural goal of every living thing and to attach holiness to what looks lofty. Bonta sets a bird's disgust beside a rat's contented crawl and lets the reader decide which one is closer to the sacred, or whether the sacred depends on who is looking.