Six short lines, three pairs, no punctuation and not a single capital letter. Even so, Dave Bonta's "What feeds us" holds a crowded inner life and a bare winter landscape. The first surprise is a strange plural, "my other selves." Not "my thoughts" or "my doubts," but selves, each with opinions of its own. They "hate the leopard," and the poem never says who or what the leopard is. That withholding is where its energy comes from.
The grammar is worth watching. Because of the line break, "hate the leopard" first stands as a complete, blunt statement, hatred with no explanation. Then "silencing them all" arrives and turns the leopard into the cause of a sudden hush. "To walk in cold weather" adds a purpose: the silence is the price, or the precondition, of going out into the cold. Who is walking is left open. It could be the leopard, or a speaker who has become the leopard, or whichever self survives once the others are quieted. My own reading is that the leopard is one of the speaker's selves, the wordless, physical, hungry one that takes over when the chatter stops. That is an inference, since nothing in the text says so, but "other selves" implies a self they are other than, and the leopard fits that place easily.
The imagery works by contrast. A leopard is usually pictured in heat and tangled growth, and here it is set in "cold weather." A snow leopard may come to mind, though the poem never names one. Cold has its own way of silencing, since snow muffles sound and breath hangs in the air, so the outer hush mirrors the inner one. What the poem presents as an act of mind (shutting up the other voices) also feels like a change in the weather.
The last couplet changes the register completely: "ice having laid / the cloth for dinner." The wild scene suddenly becomes a domestic one. The absolute phrase "ice having laid" sounds formal and slightly old-fashioned, like a servant reporting that all is ready, and it makes ice a quiet, efficient host. The line break helps. "Laid" hangs at the end of the line and the cloth drops onto the next, as if being spread. A white tablecloth is also what a frozen surface looks like. The word "cloth" may carry a darker hint of a shroud, though the poem gives only the table. What will be eaten is never said, and since the poem ends on "dinner" with no full stop, the meal never begins.
That unanswered question is why the title matters. "What feeds us" promises an answer and gives a scene instead. The pronoun "us" is also wider than the "my" of the opening, so the selves, the leopard and perhaps the reader are all gathered around the same table. The poem suggests that what nourishes may be austere: silence, cold, hunger and the clearing away of voices that would rather talk than hunt. Whether this is a gain or a loss is left deliberately uncertain, since the other selves, however noisy, are being silenced.
The sound and rhythm support this restraint. The lines run four or five syllables each, steady and light, like footsteps in snow. There is no end rhyme, but the open vowels of "all," "walk," "cold" and "cloth" run through the middle of the poem and give it a low, muffled hum. "Hate the leopard" is sharper, with its hard h and t, and the phrase sounds like the spit of the hating selves. "Silencing" slides in on sibilants, and the word itself seems to quiet the line.
The poem's significance lies in how much it does with so little. In its compactness and its attention to weather and season it recalls the haiku tradition, though it does not follow that form's counting. It pairs a psychological idea, the self as a committee that can be overruled, with a physical scene, and never settles which one is the real subject. A reader can finish it in seconds and still be turning over who is hungry, who is silenced and who sits down to eat.