Nineteen words, no punctuation and no capital letters are enough for Dave Bonta to turn a kitchen into a sanctuary. The title does the first piece of work. "The Last Supper" is the best-known meal in Christian imagery, the one that closes a story. Changing "last" to "next" reopens it. Dinner is something that happens again tomorrow, and the poem treats each ordinary meal as a small repeat of that sacred one. Its central idea is that hunger is a kind of worship and the body has its own liturgy.
The first couplet opens with a plea: "wake us to ourselves o cook." The old-fashioned "o" belongs to hymns and prayers, the sound of someone addressing a god or a muse. Here the person addressed is the cook, who is made a priest of the household. The request is odd and interesting. We are asked to be woken "to ourselves," as if ordinary life were a doze, and the thing that will rouse us is food. The poem suggests we are most fully ourselves when we are bodies with needs.
The second line carries the metaphor: "my belly is a church." Bonta lets sound build it before logic does. "Belly" and "bell" are nearly the same word, so when the line break hands us "church / bell ringing to eat," the bell seems already to have been waiting inside the belly. The enjambment also hides a compound. You can hear "church bell" across the gap, then the sentence swerves and "bell ringing to eat" becomes the belly's own bell. A rumbling stomach is the call to service, and the congregation is whoever sits down to the meal. The image is funny, because a growling stomach is not dignified, but the comedy does not cancel the reverence. A bell that summons people to eat is still a bell.
The last line, "by Jesus our supper," is the most open, and the missing punctuation is the reason. "By Jesus" can be a mild oath, the sort of exclamation a hungry person might blurt. It can mean "beside Jesus," as at a table. And "Jesus our supper" can be read as a plain equation, the way the Eucharist makes bread into body. The poem never chooses, so all three readings stay in play. To my ear the line also resembles the formula that ends many prayers, which gives the whole piece the feel of a grace said before eating.
The pronouns trace a quiet movement. The poem begins with "us" and "ourselves," narrows to a single "my belly," and ends on "our supper." One person's appetite sits inside a shared meal, and the private rumble becomes a communal summons.
The form is spare. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only two couplets of roughly five to seven syllables each. The key words are nearly all single heavy syllables, such as "wake," "cook," "church," "bell" and "eat," and they land like strokes of a bell. Hard consonants in "cook" and "church" give the first half a brisk, clanging quality. The sibilants of "us," "ourselves," "is," "Jesus" and "supper" run through the poem like a murmured prayer. The final line settles on two falling words, "Jesus" and "supper," each stressed on its first syllable and then trailing off, as though the sound itself were sitting down. With no full stop, nothing is closed off, and the meal, like the title's "next," is still going.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds without announcing any of it. It refuses the usual split between spirit and body, and it will not say whether it is joking or praying. It is both, and the effect is that a hungry stomach and a church bell start to seem like the same kind of calling. A reader who finishes it may find the next ordinary meal a little more charged than before, which is a lot to ask of four short lines.