Nine short lines, three stanzas, and a title most readers will need to look up: that is all Dave Bonta offers in "Kenosis." The word is Greek for "emptying," and in Christian theology it names the self-emptying of Christ, an idea drawn from a passage in Philippians. The poem never names Christ, but the word "cross" in its last line makes the connection hard to avoid. What Bonta does with it is unexpected. He doesn't praise self-sacrifice. He confesses an unease about how easily the speaker slips into the role of sufferer.
The first stanza sets an ordinary frame around something terrible. "This morning" sounds like a diary entry, but what follows is "I hear the prisoners / that are to die." The verb matters: the speaker hears rather than sees, so the prisoners remain voices without faces, and the poem gives no place or reason. It may be literal or imagined. The grammar is cold, too. "That" instead of "who" turns the prisoners into a category, and "are to die" sounds like a sentence already passed. The morning goes on as usual while the condemned are in it.
The second stanza moves from hearing to seeing, and from witness to purchase: "I pay for a picture / so heavy, I cannot tell / what to do with it." A picture cannot really be heavy, so the weight must be that of what it shows. Judging by where the poem ends, this may be an image of suffering or crucifixion, though the text never says so. The word "pay" hints at complicity, since looking at suffering costs something, and buying an image of it may be a way of owning it. The stanza also shifts to a plain domestic problem. The speaker doesn't know where to put the thing, as if it were an unwanted gift. The line break after "tell" lets "I cannot tell" sound, for a moment, like an admission of speechlessness before the sentence finishes. "Heavy" also falls on the fifth of nine lines, so the poem's heaviest word sits exactly at its center.
The last stanza is the strangest: "I fear the natural / aptness I have / to any cross." Until now the language has been almost entirely plain and monosyllabic, and here two Latinate words arrive, "natural" and "aptness." "Aptness" carries two meanings at once, skill and tendency. The speaker may fear being too good at bearing crosses, or too inclined to see himself as someone who bears them. The phrase "any cross," rather than "the cross," suggests he finds crosses everywhere. This is where the title turns ironic. Real self-emptying would leave no self to feel proud of its suffering, yet the speaker finds a self with a "natural" talent for martyrdom, which is a different thing. A second reading is also possible: that he fears being the one who ends up condemned, like the prisoners. The poem doesn't choose between them, and both feed the same dread.
The form supports this. There is no end rhyme and no regular meter, just short lines that read like thoughts set down one at a time. Each stanza hinges on a first-person verb: "hear," "pay," "fear." They move from perception to action to feeling, and "hear" and "fear" rhyme with each other even though they are buried inside their lines. It is the poem's only real rhyme, and it shows how little separates listening to suffering from being afraid of it. The long "i" of "I" also comes back in "die," so the self and death are set in the same stanza. The spareness is itself a kind of kenosis, since the poem has almost no adjectives beyond "heavy" and "natural" and nothing ornamental.
What makes "Kenosis" worth reading is its refusal to console. It takes a grand religious idea and tests it against one person's honesty about their own motives, and it ends on a fear rather than a resolution. For a student, it also shows how much a title can do: without it the poem is a puzzling set of images, and with it the poem becomes a question about whether we can give ourselves up without making a show of it.