Sing, the poem commands, and what it wants sung is a byte. From the first line, Dave Bonta's "Memory" sets a hymn-like tone against the least lovable unit of computing, and that clash drives everything after it. The title holds two meanings of "memory" side by side: the storage a machine has and the remembering a person does. Over six lines the poem slides between them until it is hard to say which one is being discussed.
The opening line is slippery on purpose. With no punctuation, "sing our savior the byte" can be an address to a muse ("sing, our savior, the byte"), an instruction to sing about the byte, or a claim that the byte itself saves us. Either way, words like "sing" and "savior" treat data storage as an object of faith. The second line then deflates the mood: the byte is "short and interchangeably present for us." A byte is tiny, and any one of them can stand in for another. "Present" quietly carries three senses: here, now, and a gift. This is a fair picture of digital memory, where everything is equally available and nothing has weight. Human remembering is lopsided, favoring some things and letting others fade. The poem seems to hint at what is lost when every scrap is equally "present."
The second couplet turns darker and more physical. "power is a plain skull nobody faces" gives the traditional emblem of mortality to power instead of to a person. "Plain" suggests something stripped of ornament. "Nobody faces" works as a pun, since nobody has the nerve to look at it, and a skull is exactly what is left when a face is gone. Then comes "a charnel house of abstract accounts." A charnel house stores bones, and an account might be a bank record, a user profile, or a story told about events. Put together, they picture an archive as an ossuary, where the people have been removed and only the bookkeeping remains. "Abstract" is the key word, because it names what the dead become once they are data. The poem never says whose power this is, but judging by the imagery, it belongs to whoever keeps the accounts.
The last couplet changes direction. "we find under the dirt / a gracious feast." The pronoun is now "we," not "nobody," and the verb is "find," an action of digging. After skulls and bones, we expect more bones, and we get a table laid instead. "Gracious" echoes "savior" from the opening, closing a loop of grace and communion. Dirt is a grave, but it is also where things grow and where excavators, or anyone digging into a memory, turn up what was buried. The poem does not settle whether the feast is real consolation or bitter irony. It could mean the archive nourishes us if we are willing to dig. It could also mean that the dead feed the living in the grimmest sense. Without punctuation to steer us, both readings stay open.
Formally, the poem is three unrhymed couplets in lowercase, with no punctuation and no regular meter. It reads like a message with the grammar stripped out, which suits a poem about information. The lines are short and rest their weight on blunt, stressed words such as "plain skull" and "gracious feast." Sound does quiet work too. The sibilance of "sing our savior... short... present for us" gives the opening a hushed, chant-like hiss. The crisp consonants of "skull," "faces," "find" and "feast" make the later lines feel sharper and more tactile. The final couplet is the shortest and ends on a slow, two-beat phrase, so the poem settles rather than snaps shut.
What makes "Memory" worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. In six lines it moves from liturgy to memento mori to excavation, and it makes the reader decide how to parse it. It does not tell us whether to trust digital memory. It asks what we are singing to, and what we will find when we dig.