Six lines, three stanzas, and the word "past" opens every one. Dave Bonta's "In the past" takes an ordinary phrase, the kind we use to wave something away, and treats it as a substance that changes as we get closer to it. The poem is about how our relationship with former times shifts from awe, to appetite, to something shared and possibly damaged. Nothing in the text says whose past this is, and the poem is stronger for that.
The first stanza keeps the past at arm's length. "Long past" is a spondee, two heavy syllables that sound like a door closing, and the next line gives the past a temperature: "cold as a god of business." The simile is odd in a useful way. A god suggests power we can't bargain with, and "business" suggests transactions, ledgers, things settled or owed. Judging by the imagery, the past here is an indifferent deity of accounts: it holds everything we did and is not moved by any of it. There may also be a pun on "unfinished business," though the poem never says so. The hard consonants in "cold" and "god" add to the chill, and the soft, slithering "business" that follows sounds almost bureaucratic.
Then the poem turns, and it does so through its only finite verb. "Past of which I eat, / almost cloyed." Suddenly the cold god is food, and the speaker has moved from looking up at the past to consuming it. The grammar is slightly archaic and odd, "of which I eat" rather than "which I eat," as if this were a ritual meal or a communion rather than a snack. The word "cloyed" carries the weight. It means sickened by too much sweetness, which makes nostalgia a kind of sugar. But the speaker is only "almost" cloyed. That hedge is where the stanza's honesty lies: the speaker admits to overindulging while refusing to say the pleasure has gone sour. The long "o" of "almost cloyed" slows the line to a lingering stop, as though it were being chewed.
The final stanza widens the lens from "I" to "our." "Past in our own feast" suggests the meal is now communal, and the cold of the first stanza has given way to something warmer. Even the sounds reach toward each other: "past" and "feast" share their closing "st," the nearest thing to a rhyme in the whole poem, which has no formal rhyme scheme. Then comes the closing line, "the lock altered," and it unsettles everything before it. A lock suggests a door, a pantry, a house, a place we might get back into. Altered, it could mean the past has been rekeyed so our old keys no longer fit, or that we ourselves changed the lock, deliberately sealing something in or out. The poem does not choose. Because the line is a fragment with no subject doing the altering, nobody is responsible; the change just happened. That is how memory often works.
Structurally, the poem is built from fragments. Apart from "I eat," it has no real sentences. "Long past," "Past of which," and "Past in" are noun phrases that never settle into the confident statements we might expect from someone talking about history. This suits the subject, since the past is not something we can state; we can only gesture toward it. The repetition of "past" at the head of each stanza also works like a refrain, and each time the word is placed differently: first as an adjective ("Long past"), then as something consumed, then as something we are inside of ("in our own feast"). The distance closes with every stanza, from far-off to swallowed to surrounding.
The poem's significance lies in this compression. In under twenty words, it moves from a cold, remote power to a warm, shared table and then undercuts the comfort with a changed lock. It suggests that nostalgia is both nourishment and a trap, and that the past we share with others may no longer be a place we can enter freely. It leaves us standing at that door, holding a key we aren't sure still works.