Most reminders of death come dressed for the occasion: a skull on a painter's table, a tolling bell, a solemn Latin phrase. Dave Bonta's "Memento mori" keeps the Latin, "remember that you must die", but moves the lesson into a kitchen where dinner is on the boil. The poem never mentions death or a mirror. Its whole drama is a small, stunned realisation, that the speaker is, quite suddenly, old today.
The opening line, "dinner on the boil," is a piece of ordinary life set down without comment. "On the boil" means something is under way and heating up, and it quietly suggests transformation, since heat turns one thing into another. The poem never says that the pot and the speaker are changing in the same way, but the image sits there, and the reader can make the link. Dinner also means appetite, routine and the body, which are exactly what a memento mori warns us about. The big truth turns up in the middle of a chore.
After that first line, the poem becomes one long sentence with no punctuation and no capital letters except the lonely "I." The grammar is left hanging open. "It is a miracle to me how" promises an explanation, and two interrupting phrases, "like a changeling" and "beyond all imitation of a face," delay it until the last line. The reader waits just as the speaker does, and the answer when it comes is flat and almost casual. By my count the lines swell and shrink, roughly five syllables, nine, four, ten, four, so the poem lengthens into its wonder and then drops to a plain stop. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The sound work is subtler. The long, Latinate words in the middle ("miracle," "imitation") give way to the short, blunt words of the ending: "I am old today." The most important statement is the simplest.
The changeling is the poem's strangest image. In folklore, a changeling is a substitute left behind when the real child is taken, something that looks right but is not. Here it is the speaker's own self that feels swapped, as though the younger person has been quietly replaced by an old stranger. The phrase "beyond all imitation of a face" is deliberately slippery. A changeling is usually a copy, so perhaps this one has gone past copying and become so complete that no one could tell. Or perhaps the face has changed past what any likeness could capture. Judging by the imagery, both readings point to the same unease: the speaker looks at their own life and sees something that is both theirs and not theirs.
The word "miracle" gives the poem its odd, brave tone. We expect it to be used for wonderful things, but here it holds amazement and dread together, and it carries no complaint. "To me" makes the wonder personal. Getting old is the most ordinary thing there is, yet it feels like a private marvel when it happens to you. The word "today" compresses years into a single afternoon. Ageing is slow, but we notice it in jolts, and the poem is one of those jolts.
That is where its significance lies. It takes an old tradition of reminding people they will die and strips away the solemn props. There is no skull, no sermon and no moral, only a pot of dinner and a person caught off guard. Its compression recalls haiku, with a concrete image followed by a turn, though the poem makes no such claim for itself. It trusts the reader to feel the connection between the bubbling pot and the changed face. We may read it quickly, but it is the kind of poem that is likely to return to us in a kitchen years later, when the steam rises and we catch sight of someone we almost recognise.