Dave Bonta treats the womb like a famous piece of repertoire, with arrangements, sheet music and a performance history, and he describes it in the flat, helpful voice of a concert programme. The deadpan is the point. Because the poem never winks, its absurd claims sound almost reasonable, and under the joke runs a real question: how old is the body's knowledge, and who is it for?
The opening sends us far back before humans. The song begins "on a minor key among the bivalves / and sea cucumbers," creatures not known for their musicianship, and the sea setting suggests the womb's watery origins. The later line about communicating "over great distances underwater" reinforces this. Sound does travel well in water, and the poem seems to be imagining the womb as a remnant of an ocean. The tunes of those first creatures "are all palindromes," melodies that read the same forwards and backwards, and they "serve / a purely decorative purpose." The phrase is funny because it is so grand about something so slight. It also hints at a cycle in which the beginning and end of a tune are the same.
The form suits this tone. The poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre, and its sentences spill across line breaks the way speech does. Sometimes the breaks add a comic beat. "That probably goes / without saying" is interrupted at "goes," and then the speaker says the obvious thing anyway: "It's got rhythm." The phrase "The song of the womb" opens three separate sentences, like headings in a handbook, which gives the poem a mock-authoritative frame. There is some quiet sound-play too. The p's in "palindromes," "purely," "decorative" and "purpose" tumble together, and "bivalves" and "sea cucumbers" are oddly pleasing to say. The only exclamation mark comes at "consciousness!" The speaker has been calm until then, and he loses his composure over the biggest idea: "Scientists say" the song "may predate the evolution / of consciousness." Rhythm that comes before thought is a startling idea, and the poem lets itself be briefly amazed.
Then comes the turn. "It is not, however, / the first choice of the womb itself." Up to here the song has been something described from outside, by scientists and arrangers and listeners. Now the womb becomes a character with its own taste. It "prefers bossa nova," a style whose relaxed sway fits the idea of a body at ease, "and the occasional hymn." That word "occasional" is a nice touch, because it makes the womb sound like a moody person with a mixed playlist rather than a symbol.
The final phrase, "the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus," is the longest and most formal in the poem, and it lands as bathos after the casual bossa nova. It is also the most culturally specific, and the poem does not explain it. Judging by the text, one reading is that even the oldest, most biological thing in the poem has been shaped by culture, so that the womb has absorbed a particular religious upbringing along with the ancient sea. Another is that the poem is gently teasing how religion lays claim to the body. A third is simpler: a heart and a womb are both rhythmic, and the pairing is a small joke about the heartbeat. The poem supports all three and insists on none.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it holds wonder and humour together. It could have been solemn about origins and motherhood, and instead it mixes registers: marine biology, concert programmes, scientific hedging, Brazilian dance music and Catholic devotion. The collisions are comic, but they also make a serious point. The womb is older than thought, yet it is not a mere mechanism. In the poem's last lines it has preferences, a personality and perhaps even a history, which is a far more affectionate way to picture it than as a vessel.