A steward looks after something that belongs to someone else, and that quiet definition is the hinge of this eight-line poem. Dave Bonta's title promises care and responsibility, perhaps a gentle ecological ethic. What the poem delivers is a question about ownership and a confession of damage. "Before the mouth, / who owned me?" The mouth is both the thing that eats and the thing that names, so the speaker is asking who held title to him before appetite and language began. If stewards manage what isn't theirs, the poem wonders who the steward himself belongs to. It never answers in words.
The second movement turns abruptly from "me" to "we": "We set fire to the marsh / and to the swallow." The private question becomes a collective act, and the verb arrives flat and unexplained. The pairing is strange. A whole landscape and a single bird are joined by "and" as if they were equal victims. The word "swallow" also works as a verb, and it hooks back to the mouth of the first stanza. For a moment the line seems to say that the act of swallowing, of consuming, is itself what burns. That is one possible reading, but the double meaning is hard to ignore.
The sentence then spills across the stanza break: "full of false Latin." The grammar holds the phrase in suspension. It could describe the swallow, the marsh, or the "we" who do the burning. That ambiguity is useful, because Latin is the language of classification and authority. We think of the names by which creatures are catalogued, or of law and ceremony. Calling it "false" suggests a counterfeit expertise, a way of sounding entitled to manage the world while getting its words wrong. The sounds support the mood. "Fire," "full" and "false" share a breathy *f*, as if the line were fanning the flames it describes.
Next comes the poem's driest joke: "Our anchor is a salt-cellar." An anchor should be heavy, dark and strong enough to hold a ship against a current. A salt-cellar is a small table object, domestic and decorative. It is also a container of what the sea leaves behind. The line suggests that whatever steadies us is trivial, tabletop-sized, and tied to appetite and seasoning. We have moored ourselves with a condiment. The flat declarative tone makes it funnier and more unsettling, since the speaker states it as plain fact.
Then the mood changes. "At evening in the harbor, / horses run to the sea." After the fire and the fake Latin, the final couplet is calm and almost cinematic. A harbor is where boats are held and secured, yet the horses run past that security toward open water, the opposite of anchoring. We are not told whether they flee the fire or simply answer the pull of the tide. Either way, they are the only figures in the poem that nobody names, burns or manages. Read against the opening question, they look like a partial answer, an image of something that isn't owned.
The sound structure quietly supports this. The poem is unrhymed except for one pairing: "me" in line two and "sea" in the last line. That rhyme bookends the poem, tying the self to the sea. It hints, as an inference rather than a statement, that the speaker might belong to something larger than any deed or title.
The poem is built from four couplets of short, plain lines, mostly one- and two-syllable words. Only "Latin," "evening," "harbor" and "swallow" stretch beyond that. The statements sit side by side with no connecting words, so the reader has to build the links. The sentence that crosses between stanzas two and three feels unsettled, while the last couplet is a complete, closed sentence. That contrast makes the ending feel like release.
The poem's strength is its compression. In eight lines it takes apart an entire vocabulary of stewardship, dominion and naming without lecturing anyone. It never says the burning is wrong. It lets the fire, the counterfeit language and the absurd anchor stand next to one another until the reader sees the problem. It ends on an image no one controls, which leaves a harder question than a moral would: what if the guardians need guarding, and the wild was never ours to hold?