Eight lowercase lines, not a single punctuation mark, and a small theology gets turned inside out. Dave Bonta's "Divinity school" sounds at first like a confession about religious training. But the schooling it describes happens in the body, and the lesson the speaker ends with is close to the opposite of what the title promises.
The first stanza reads like a fall. "Pleasure turned divine" seems generous: something ordinary has been raised to the sacred. Yet the very next line records a loss: "I forgot I am water." The tenses matter here. The forgetting is in the past, but the fact, "I am water," stays stubbornly in the present. Whatever the speaker has learned, the body has not stopped being fluid, yielding and tearful. What follows is the price of that forgetting: "ache in a devout way / and preach against smiling." Because there is no punctuation, "ache" could be a noun or a verb, and the last two lines slide into each other as one breathless list of what the speaker became. The irony is sharp. Pleasure is made holy in line one, and by line four the speaker campaigns against smiling. The poem suggests that sanctifying a feeling can be the first step toward policing it.
The title seems to join in the wordplay. A divinity school is where theology is taught, but "school" can also mean a group of fish, and "water" sits right there in the next line. That reading is my inference, not something the poem states, but it fits. The speaker is taught to be rigid by an institution of doctrine, while the real instruction comes from being a fluid creature among others.
The second stanza turns on a small word, "so." What follows is a consequence rather than a rebellion. "I own my days / of sadness and mirth" works two ways: to own is to possess, and to own up is to admit. The speaker claims both states equally. "Mirth" is also an interesting choice. It is a slightly old, churchy word for joy, as if even the vocabulary of happiness has passed through the seminary. The speaker doesn't throw the vocabulary out, only the hierarchy that ranks sadness above joy.
The last two lines carry the poem's quiet reversal. In stanza one the speaker "forgot"; here the speaker is "unable to forget." That echo is the hinge of the whole piece. The thing that cannot be forgotten is "a passion," and the word is doubled in the way the title invites: it means desire, but it also carries the religious sense of the Passion, a suffering endured with devotion. The poem lets both meanings sit in one noun. Then comes the simile, "soft as any night." Nothing about it is doctrinal. It is plain, ordinary and gentle, and the word "any" insists that this passion is no rarer than nightfall. Softness also brings back the water of line two, now as something to be at peace with rather than a fact to be forgotten.
The poem is unrhymed, but its sound is carefully managed. The first stanza's lines run five, seven, six and six syllables, short and steady, like phrases from a creed. The second stanza goes five, five, nine, five. That long line, "unable to forget a passion," is the one that will not stay short, and its stretched length seems to enact the inability to let go. The long *i* sound threads through the poem and lands at three line endings: "divine," "smiling," "night." The first and last lines share that vowel, so the poem ends where it began, but the divine has come down to an ordinary night.
What makes "Divinity school" worth reading is how much it fits into so little space without settling into either piety or rebellion. The speaker keeps the religious words (divine, devout, passion) and takes them back for the human body, with its tears, its smiles and its nights. For a student learning to read short, unpunctuated poems, it also shows that ambiguity can be the point. Every line can be read two ways, and the poem is about what happens when someone is taught to choose only one.