Most love poems offer roses, moonlight or a pulse that skips. Dave Bonta's "Love song" offers carrion. Two lovers describe themselves as scavengers, a dog and a crow, who find dead things and eat them. Somewhere in that bleak picture the poem slips in the word "wedding," and the central idea comes into view. Love here is not sweetness but shared appetite and survival, a partnership between two creatures who have already been chewed up by the world and now feed on what is left.
The opening line is a flat metaphor with no "like" to soften it: "I am a dog and you a crow." Both animals are scavengers, but they belong to different elements. One is bound to the ground and the other free in the air. That makes the pairing a small picture of two different beings meeting in a common need. The next line, "we find dead things", is blunt and nearly all stressed syllables. It never says what the dead things are. Judging by the rest of the poem, they might be old beliefs, outgrown selves or worn-out rules, but the vagueness is deliberate. The poem trusts the reader to feel the unease of that plural noun.
The second couplet is the strangest and richest: "that we will eat / as customs ate us." The verb returns in two forms, "eat" and "ate", as though the sounds have been rearranged to show a reversal. Once the lovers were the eaten, consumed by "customs," which I read as the social rules and expectations that surround courtship and marriage. Now they are the eaters. The little word "as" is slippery. It can mean "in the same way that," "while" or "because," and the poem does not choose between them. Each reading suggests a slightly different story about revenge, repetition or simple cause and effect.
The pronouns tell their own story. The poem begins with separate people, "I" and "you," then moves to "we," then to "us," and finishes on "our." The lovers merge as the poem goes on, and the grammar does it for them. The form supports this. There are three couplets, no punctuation, no capital letters beyond the "I," and no rhyme. Without full stops, each thought leaks into the next, so the poem feels like one continuous breath. It also never closes. The last line, "and our wedding night", simply stops, with nothing to seal it.
The rhythm is worth hearing. The first line is almost a nursery rhyme, close to a steady beat of eight syllables, and its childlike simplicity makes the grim content stranger. Then the lines shrink to clipped fragments like "that we will eat." The fifth line, "as we become this sum of a cloud", is the longest and loosest, and it seems to drift the way a cloud does. Sound ties things together quietly. The hard *c* of "crow" comes back in "customs" and "cloud," and the *d* of "dog" is echoed in "dead." The animals, the rules and the sky all carry the same harsh consonant.
The final couplet is the most open to interpretation. "Sum" is an arithmetic word, a total, yet it is attached to something as vague as a cloud. Two creatures add up to a vapour. I take this to mean that the lovers dissolve into something larger and less defined than either of them, and that the poem finds this more intimate than a kiss. The wedding night arrives last and slightly out of order, after the feeding and the becoming, as though it were a result rather than an event. The word "night" also suits a crow, and the lovers seem to melt into its darkness. That reading is an inference, but the imagery invites it.
What makes the poem significant is how much it does in six lines. It takes the title "Love song" and gives it a twist, since the only songs a dog and a crow can offer are a howl and a caw. Yet the poem is not cynical. The steady "we" insists on partnership, and the lovers share even their grim meals. The poem suggests that real intimacy may begin when the pretence of customs is stripped away and two creatures admit what they are. A short, unrhymed poem can still make us rethink what a love poem is for.