A denial is a strange way to begin a poem, because you can't deny something without first bringing it into the room. Dave Bonta's opening declaration, that the poem has nothing to do with 9/11, works exactly this way. By the end of the first sentence we have been handed a catalogue of that day's images, "planes," "falling bodies," "twisted I-beams," each one wrapped in a *no*. The disaster stays outside the door, but the poem is built around its outline.
The list refuses more than images. "Denunciations," "flags" and "pacifist cris de coeur" cover the predictable responses on every side, and the slightly grand French phrase sounds faintly teasing. Judging by the tone, the poem is wary of the verse that big events tend to produce. Even "nothing combustible" does double work, since it can mean fuel and fire but also the kind of inflamed rhetoric that follows a catastrophe.
Then the poem turns, and the language relaxes into plain, short words: "In this poem, we are / eating soup." The radio is off "as it always is during meals," which matters because it makes the silence a habit, not a protest. "Nobody calls to tell us / to tune in" quietly recalls how bad news spreads, by phone call and broadcast, and shows us a household that the news doesn't reach. One line break is especially clever. "We are for" sounds for a split second like someone taking a side, before the next line shrinks it to "the most part ignoring." The poem lets us hear a declaration and then undercuts it.
What the family is ignoring turns out to be a different kind of event: "the extraordinary events taking place / all around us in field & woodlot, / in the air & soil & water / from which we are knit." The verb "knit" is gentle and domestic, and it makes the body a piece of the landscape. The ampersands, repeated in "field & woodlot" and "hot, & so good," give the poem a handwritten, unhurried feel. They also bind things together on the page the way the poem binds people to place.
The soup passage is where the humor arrives. "The soup is hot, & so good" is almost childlike in its pleasure. Then comes the poem's wittiest move: dipping bread, the speaker says, is "extending its dominion." "Dominion" is the language of empires and conquest, and here it describes a crust soaking up broth. The poem has refused geopolitics, yet it slips a miniature, harmless version of it into the kitchen. The slurping "as I learned to do years ago / in Japan" adds another layer. The speaker's manners come from another country, and a gesture of appreciation learned abroad sits comfortably at an American-sounding table. The poem doesn't comment on this, but the placement is hard to ignore. The father who "will wash the dishes" brings in the family and the future tense, and the day is assumed to carry on.
The ending is the most carefully weighted moment. Each person will "slice open / & remove the inedible stone from / a dead-ripe peach." The sentence is calm, but its words are not entirely neutral. "Slice open" is a small violence, and "dead-ripe" lets the word *dead* in at the last moment, though it means perfect ripeness. The "inedible stone" is the hard centre that must be taken out so the sweetness can be eaten. Without saying so, the poem suggests that grief and fear are like that stone, real and present but not the whole fruit.
Formally, everything is understated. It is free verse in a single stanza, with no rhyme, and the lines are short and run on into one another like the steady turns of a spoon. The grammar moves from one long sentence of negatives to simple statements, a shift that mirrors the shift from public noise to private attention.
The poem is significant because it asks whether looking away can be a form of looking. The title keeps 9/11 in view the whole time, so the soup and the peach are never an escape. They show what is left to value, and the poem treats that as a serious answer to catastrophe.