Eleven lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still Dave Bonta's "Self-sacrifice" manages to set two kinds of congregation side by side and refuse to say which one is worse. The church sings about martyrs, and the tavern next door tells its own stories about people who destroy themselves. The poem's central idea is a quiet, uncomfortable one: that sacrifice and self-destruction may be the same impulse, honoured in one building and merely drunk in the other.
The opening is the most puzzling part. The church "sings of people / not worth one wing." A wing suggests an angel's wing, so these may be people judged unworthy of heaven, or saints so cheaply celebrated that they are "not worth" even that much. The poem doesn't settle it, and the ambiguity is useful. There is also a cheekier reading, since a wing is what you might order in a tavern. That can only be an inference, but it would explain why the next stanza moves so easily to the pub, as if the word itself were showing the way out of the church.
That move comes as an order: "but go to the tavern / next door." The "but" turns the poem sharply, and the plain imperative sounds like a friendly tip. The words "next door" matter too. The tavern is not across town or at the edge of respectable life. It shares a wall with the church, so the two places seem like neighbouring branches of the same trade, both dealing in stories about people who gave themselves up.
The last stanza, the longest at four lines, is where the poem's tone becomes most interesting. The stories are called "pretty," a word that sounds sweet and faintly sarcastic at once, as though suicide had been turned into decoration. Then comes "people / that have killed themselves / or been accessory to it." The phrase "accessory to it" is borrowed from law, from the vocabulary of crime, and it's a strange way to describe someone's relation to their own death. It suggests that self-destruction is rarely done alone. Others stand by, hand over the means, or look away. Perhaps the listeners in the tavern are accessories too.
Then the poem ends on its most striking image: these people "use gin like milk." Milk is the first thing we are given, a symbol of nourishment, safety and being cared for. To treat gin as milk is to turn the poison into a baby's food, and to suggest a drinker who has gone back to infancy, drinking daily and without thinking because the body demands it. The comparison is gentle in sound and grim in meaning. The soft simile closes the poem with no comment, so the reader has to decide whether the picture is tender or horrifying. Probably it is both.
The poem's sound is quietly crafted. There is no regular metre or rhyme scheme, and the short lines read like speech broken into breaths. Yet "sings" and "wing" chime across the first two lines, giving the church a little music before the poem leaves it. The sounds in "killed" and "milk" echo each other as well, so that death and nourishment are linked by consonants before they are linked by meaning. The stanzas grow from two lines to two to four, so the tavern gets more room than the church, as if its stories were harder to stop telling. The phrase "or been accessory to it" is also the longest, most trailing line, and it is followed by the shortest blunt one, "and use gin like milk."
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It doesn't preach against religion or against drink. Instead it sets two ways of telling stories about self-giving and self-ruin next to each other and lets the reader notice how alike they sound. The title makes the point: "self-sacrifice" is a noble word in church, and the tavern shows what it can look like on an ordinary night. Whether the speaker admires the tavern's honesty, mourns its customers, or mocks the church, the poem leaves open, and that openness is what keeps you reading it again.