Most prayers are made in cathedrals or on stormy decks. This one seems to be made over breakfast. Dave Bonta's "Hushed" is only six lines long, yet it asks for a great deal: relief from talk, a safe arrival, and a gentle reintroduction to pleasure. Its central idea is that real peace is not noise defeated but noise withdrawn. What the speaker wants most is to stop performing language and simply be spoken to.
The first couplet sets two very different things side by side: "morning sandwich" and "deliver me from discourse." The sandwich is small, ordinary and edible. "Discourse" is abstract, a word for argument, lecture and the endless exchange of opinion. The line "deliver me from" echoes the language of prayer, so the poem begins by treating chatter as something one might need rescuing from, almost like a danger. There is no punctuation, which opens up a playful second reading. "Morning sandwich" could be what delivers the speaker, since a mouth full of bread cannot join in discourse. The title "Hushed" supports this. Silence arrives by solemn means or by something as comic and humble as breakfast, and the poem lets both readings stand.
The poem has no rhyme and no capital letters. It runs on short lines of two to five syllables, so the reader has to slow down and take each phrase separately. What it has instead of rhyme is texture, especially the soft hissing consonants. "Sandwich," "discourse," "ship," "safe," "history" and "pleasure" all carry an s or sh sound, and the poem gradually hushes itself as you read it aloud. Even the one hard stop, the repeated *d* in "deliver" and "discourse," gives way to those softer sounds.
The second couplet changes the scale. "Till the ship be brought / home safe" suddenly puts us at sea. The phrase "be brought" is old-fashioned subjunctive, the kind of grammar that sounds like liturgy or an older English, so the speaker's voice takes on an almost scriptural dignity. The poem never says what the ship is. Judging by the imagery, it might be the speaker's own life, a person they love, or some larger undertaking. The ambiguity is useful, because anything precious and still in motion fits. The enjambment matters here too. The line break strands "home safe" on a line of its own, two stressed syllables with nothing around them, and the pause before them makes the relief feel earned. The word "till" tells us the hush is meant to be temporary, a vigil kept until something is finished.
The last couplet describes what comes after the waiting: "and there read to me / the history of pleasure." "There" points to the safe harbour of the previous lines, so the ending is both a place and a reward. The speaker also does not want to read. They want to be read to, which is a childlike and trusting position. It also quietly corrects the opening. The speaker doesn't want an end to words, only to the kind that demand a response. Being read to is language received rather than argued over. And "the history of pleasure" is a curious thing to ask for. Pleasure here is something with a past, studied and told as a story, and it isn't simply to be enjoyed. The line suggests that pleasure might be fuller if it were first heard about calmly, from someone else's voice.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with so little. It sets the sacred beside the trivial without mocking either one, and the sandwich doesn't spoil the prayer. It also speaks to a very recognisable modern wish: to get away from the constant pressure to talk, comment and have a position, without giving up on human company altogether. The poem ends not in solitude but in a voice reading to the speaker, and a hush that has someone in it.