Dozing through a sermon is usually a small embarrassment. Dave Bonta's "Vision" turns it into the doorway to something stranger. In six short lines, a man nodding off in church finds himself surrounded by "stone people I did not know" and gradually becomes one of them. The poem's central idea is that the line between a living worshipper and a carved figure is thinner than it looks. Asleep, still and slack-faced, the speaker is already halfway to being an object in the building.
The grammar carries much of this transformation. The poem is a single unpunctuated sentence, split into three couplets, with no capital letters to mark a new beginning. The only finite verbs belong to the speaker's ordinary, waking self: "I did not know," "I slept." Once he is asleep, the verbs vanish. "My face broken" and "my head an antiquity" are simply states, with nothing in them that moves. The speaker's own sentence has gone as still as the statues, which is a quiet and clever way of showing someone turning to stone.
The first image is plain and a little childlike. "Stone people" is not how a guidebook would put it, and the phrase makes the carvings feel less like decoration than like a silent congregation. Judging by the imagery, they might be figures set into or along the walls, though the poem never says exactly what they are. "I did not know" them, and the strangeness of that admission is that we normally don't expect to know statues. It hints that these figures were once people with names, and that the speaker is the unfamiliar one among them. The casual, contracted "'round" keeps the tone conversational and slightly wry, so the church doesn't feel grand or intimidating.
The second couplet turns inward. "My face broken" sits alone on its line, and it can be read in more than one way. A sleeping face loses its expression and goes slack. Old stone faces are chipped and worn by time. And "broken" is also a religious word, associated with humility and contrition, which makes an irony of the situation: the man who missed the sermon ends up looking more penitent than if he had stayed awake. The poem lets all these meanings sit together without choosing between them.
Then comes "antiquity," the longest and most Latinate word in a poem otherwise made of short, plain ones. It means both great age and an ancient object, so the speaker's head is promoted from a tired head to a museum piece, a relic. The comedy is gentle but the idea underneath is serious: a body that sleeps resembles the dead, and a head resting still for long enough begins to look like something dug up. "On two pillars" ends the poem on architecture. It is not certain what the pillars are. Perhaps they are the speaker's propped forearms, or perhaps the head has become a carved capital on columns of its own, which is an inference rather than something the text states. Either way, the last image fuses the man with the building around him.
The sound of the poem is understated. There is no rhyme, but there is echo: the long *o* of "stone," "know," and "broken" links the strangers to the speaker's own damaged face before he has fully joined them. "Slept most of the sermon" is thick with soft *s* sounds, as if the line itself were drowsing. The lines also vary in length, and the two shortest, "my face broken" and "on two pillars," each close a couplet like a stone being set down.
The poem is significant for how much it does with so little. It is funny, since the speaker is hardly a heroic seeker and admits to sleeping through "most" of the service. It also holds a quiet seriousness about time and mortality. The title adds one more twist. With his eyes closed, the speaker is the one who sees something, while the sermon itself is never reported. The vision comes from the nap, not from the preaching, and what it shows is that he, too, will one day be a figure on the wall.