Funeral poems usually promise solemnity, so the first thing to notice about Dave Bonta's is how quickly it slips away from it. In six short lines there is no coffin, no list of mourners, and no named dead person. The one who has died is "a newly drowned body." What we get instead is a voice, a set of stairs and a dance.
The opening is already off balance. "church and I sang" starts in lowercase and without an article, as if we have walked in halfway through a sentence. The whole poem has this clipped, fragmentary quality, as though connecting words have been trimmed away. "Church" sits beside "I" almost like a second person, a singer in its own right. Then comes the surprise: the psalm is sung "to the stairs." Psalms are normally addressed to God, but here the listener is part of the building. The speaker may be unable to face the loss head-on and sings at the nearest solid thing. Or the stairs may suggest ascent and descent, a threshold the dead are crossing. The poem doesn't choose between these readings, and that openness is part of its method.
The second couplet is the turn. "A newly drowned body / was there to dance." The phrase "was there to" gives the body a purpose, as if it had arrived with a job to do. Dance is the last verb we expect for a corpse, yet a drowned body is moved by water and does sway. The image is grotesque and tender at once. "Newly" keeps the grief raw, since this death has only just happened. Psalms often speak of floods and deep waters, so the drowning can feel like the psalm's own imagery arriving in the room. That is an inference rather than something the poem says, but the pairing of "psalm" and "drowned" invites it. There is also an old tradition of the dead leading the living in a dance, and the poem seems to touch it without leaning on it.
The final couplet is the most daring: "out of her being / out of her us." The repetition of "out of" makes the lines chant-like, and the phrase carries two meanings. It can mean origin, as in something born or made out of her. It can also mean loss, as in being left out of her or run out of her. Then the grammar bends. "Being" works as a noun, a whole existence, but "us" is a pronoun forced into the same role, as if "us" were a substance the woman could hold. The reading that follows is that the mourners are made of her, and without her they are emptied. Notice too that "her" appears only here. For two stanzas she is just a body, and she becomes a person only at the moment she is mourned.
That change connects to the poem's quiet shift in pronouns. It starts with "I" and ends with "us." The movement from singular to plural is the real action of the funeral. One person's private singing becomes a community defined by who it has lost.
The sound of the poem supports this. The lines are short, running from four to six syllables, so each couplet feels like a held breath. There is no rhyme, but small echoes tie it together. The hissing s sounds of "sang," "psalm" and "stairs" give way to the heavy d of "drowned" and "dance," and "stairs" faintly answers "there" in the next stanza. There is no punctuation at all, so nothing is sealed off with a full stop. The reader decides where grief pauses. The last word, "us," is about as small and soft as a word can be, and the poem's biggest idea arrives almost in a whisper.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to console in the usual ways. It offers no heaven, no comforting explanation and no portrait of the dead woman. It gives three images, a song to stairs, a dancing body and a "her" that turns into "us," and trusts the gaps between them to do the work. For a student, it shows how much a poem can say by leaving out the connections and letting the reader supply the feeling.