On Easter morning, a man stamps on a packet of yeast. That is the whole event of Dave Bonta's untitled poem, which is marked only by asterisks, and it is odd and funny and strangely moving. The speaker presses the envelope under his weight to burst the inner sachet of nutrients, and within hours the yeast has woken and swollen the bag. Bonta calls this being "resurrected." The word is the poem's wager: that a kitchen chore on the holiest morning of the Christian year can be a small version of the festival's story.
The first stanza is told in the past tense and in plain, physical language. The verbs are blunt: "took," "placed," "brought all / my weight down." The line break after "all" makes the reader feel the pressure before the sentence finishes, and the short line "my weight down on it" lands like a foot on the floor. Nothing here sounds holy. Then the register shifts. The envelope swells "like a sheep's stomach / with afflatus." Afflatus is a rare, learned word meaning divine inspiration, a breathing-in of spirit, and it sits oddly beside the mundane gas that is actually inflating the bag. That is the joke, and also the point. The word's literal sense, a blowing or breath, fits what the yeast is doing, so the grand vocabulary is partly accurate. The sheep's stomach is a shrewd image too. It is animal, slightly grotesque and domestic, and, I'd suggest, it quietly brings in the lamb of Easter and Passover without ever naming it.
The second stanza turns to the future: "Now I will feed it." The speaker's diet for the yeast is "malt & honey / & bitter herbs." Malt and honey belong to brewing, but "bitter herbs" also recalls the Passover meal, which is part of the background of the Easter story. Judging by this, Bonta is stirring the two traditions into the same pot. The yeast then passes the brew "through its multitudinous body," a phrase that makes a mass of microscopic cells sound like one vast creature, and "multitudinous" may echo Macbeth's "multitudinous seas." If so, it prepares the ending, where the bottle holds a "brown sea." The poem shrinks a bottle to the scale of the yeast and lets it be an ocean.
The final image is the most subtle. The spent cells become "empty tombs" that "drift to the bottom." The Easter tomb is empty because its occupant has risen, and here the tombs are empty because the cells have done their work and died. The poem does not say whether this undercuts the resurrection or deepens it, and I think it does both. These cells were revived only to be used up, and what they leave behind is beer. Life continues through consumption and transformation, and the miracle is less a single dramatic rising than an ongoing process in which death feeds something new. The yeast's "resurrection" is also a job, and the poem seems to accept that.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the lines vary in length, so it reads like a thoughtful note-to-self. The ampersands add to that casual, jotted feel and keep the tone humble. Sound still does quiet work. In the last stretch the b-sounds gather: "bitter," "brew," "beer," "bottom," "bottle's," "brown." They give the closing lines a soft, bubbling thickness, and the very short last line, "brown sea," drops the poem down like the sediment it describes.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it neither mocks religion nor simply borrows its language to sound profound. The humour is real, since stamping on a bag of yeast is not dignified, and so is the reverence. Bonta suggests that the idea of resurrection is not confined to churches and can be glimpsed in a fridge, a floor and a bottle. The poem is also honest about what that kind of renewal costs. Something wakes, works and dies, and someone gets to drink the result.