Say the first seven lines aloud and you can hear one sound being turned over like a stone: health, holy, wholesome, hole, mole, sole, pole. The poem has no title, only a row of asterisks, and it gives no sentence to hold onto. It begins instead with a run of words that echo each other, and the interest lies in how they fall.
The chain begins with big, abstract ideas. Health, holiness and wholesomeness are all words for being sound and complete. They are also closer than they look. "Whole," "hale," "health" and "holy" come from the same old root, which is why "hale" can return at the start of the second stanza as if the poem were circling back to its starting point. Between those two appearances, though, something drops. "Wholesome" is followed by "hole," its near twin in sound, but a hole is a missing piece, the opposite of whole. One small shift of spelling turns completeness into absence. The words that follow, "mole" and "pole," keep the same sound but move into physical things. A mole lives in a hole under the ground, and a pole suggests either the top and bottom of the planet or a plain upright stick. The abstract slides down into soil.
"Sole shallow" is the one line in the first stanza with two words, and it breaks the pattern slightly. A sole is the underside of a foot, so it prepares the later word "foot," and it sounds like "soul," which sits comfortably beside "holy." That second connection is an inference, but the poem's sounds invite it. "Shallow" then pulls against "hole," because a hole suggests depth and the sole only touches the surface. The line puts body and ground into contact and keeps them shallow, as if standing on the earth were a different kind of depth from digging into it.
The second stanza loosens the grammar as well as the sound. "Hale / words / a little / sky / foot / the earth / all over / loosening / the rain / from / the sea / front" can be read in several ways, and the poem does not choose. "Hale words" could mean healthy words, which would make the first stanza a demonstration of what healthy language does. "A little sky" and "foot" put the highest and lowest things side by side, so the whole scale from head to ground fits into a few lines. "All over" might describe the earth, or it might mean "finished." "Loosening" has no clear subject: it could be the rain, the earth, or the words. The final break, "the sea / front," lets "front" stand alone, and a reader may hear both a seafront and a weather front, the thing that actually brings rain from the sea. A single line break holds two meanings.
The rhythm supports this. Most lines in the first stanza are a single stressed word, so reading them feels like taking measured steps. "Holy," "wholesome" and "shallow" give a small lilt in an otherwise tapping sequence. In the second stanza the pace becomes less even. "Loosening," the longest word in the poem, slows the middle, and "from" stranded on its own line makes the reader wait for the next word, like a held breath before the rain arrives. There is no punctuation and no capital letters, so nothing forces the lines into a sentence. The white space around each phrase does the work that commas and full stops would normally do.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from so little. It has no story and no argument, yet it shows that words are physical things, linked by sound and by hidden family ties, and that a poem can move from "health" to "pole" and from "words" to "rain" without ever stating a theme. Its quiet suggestion is that wellbeing is not an abstract state but something close to the ground, to feet, weather and breath. By the last line, language has been loosened until it behaves like the rain it describes.