The most striking thing about Dave Bonta's "The ghost of Christmas present" is how little it asks for. Its title borrows from Dickens, whose ghost of Christmas present shows Scrooge the festive world as it is happening around him. Bonta's version quietly swaps the abundance of that scene for something smaller. The word "present" is also a pun. It means the gift under the tree, but also the plain fact of being here, now. The poem never mentions Christmas again. Judging by the title, the "ghost" may be that elusive state of being fully present, which haunts us because we so rarely manage it.
The speaker's wish is stated at once: "above all things I wish." The phrase sounds solemn and almost prayerful, yet the verb is only "wish," not "pray" or "demand," which keeps the tone humble. What follows is not a grand desire but a domestic picture: sitting "at the table with napkins open." The napkins are a small, exact detail. They are unfolded and ready, so the whole table seems to be waiting for a meal and for company. Then comes the poem's most memorable phrase, "talking in the mother tongue of wonder." Wonder is imagined here as a first language, something we all spoke as children and half-forget as adults. The sounds support the idea. "Mother," "tongue" and "wonder" share the same short, rounded vowel, so the line hums with a soft, repeated note, as if the words themselves were being spoken in a familiar accent.
The second stanza turns on the verb "righted." We right a capsized boat or a fallen chair, so the speaker implies that something has tipped over. Nothing in the poem says what, and that restraint is part of its power. The reader is left to supply the loss of balance, whether it is busyness, grief, distraction or simply the ordinary drift of life. The sentence then slows and softens: "my wife leaning into sleep." The talk of the first stanza has quietly dissolved. We move from conversation to drowsiness and then to the final, wordless image, "the treasure of touch." The sequence runs from speech to silence, as though the poem were suggesting that wonder's mother tongue eventually gives way to something older still. Touch needs no vocabulary at all.
"Treasure" is the word that most clearly answers the title. If a present is a gift, here the real gift is not wrapped. It is physical closeness, valued like gold but costing nothing. The long "ee" sounds of "leaning" and "sleep" lull the line, and the closing phrase is neatly bound by the repeated "t" of "treasure" and "touch," which also echoes "table," "talking" and "tongue" earlier. The poem ends on its shortest line, so the final image lands like something gently set down.
The form reinforces all this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, and every line begins in lowercase. The whole poem is a single sentence, running without a full stop across two three-line stanzas. That grammar matters. A sentence that never closes leaves the wish open, unfulfilled and still hovering, which fits a title about a ghost. The lines also vary in length. The second line, "to sit at the table with napkins open," is the longest and feels like a table stretched out for guests, while the last is the shortest and most intimate. The rhythm follows the content, widening into company and then narrowing to a single touch.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet argument against the usual idea of a holiday. Many of us measure Christmas by what we give and receive, but Bonta's speaker wants only a meal, a language of wonder, a sleepy partner and a hand to hold. In six short lines he reminds us that the things we most long for are often the ones already within reach, if we could only be present enough to notice them.