The title does a lot of quiet work before the first line begins. "Æcerbot" is the name of an Old English charm meant to heal fields that have stopped bearing, and the word roughly means "field remedy." Nothing in Bonta's poem suggests a translation, but the borrowed title tells us what kind of text to expect. It will not describe the countryside from a comfortable distance. It will act like a ritual, a set of words and gestures meant to do something for the land. The central idea is surprising: the way to restore a bond with the earth runs through the most ordinary bodily acts, eating and excreting, done with full attention.
The opening is deliberately unglamorous. "We come close to the land" uses a plural "we," so the speaker is part of a group, and "close" can mean physical nearness as much as intimacy. Then comes the diet: "peas and pork / and boiled beef." The plain food and the thudding consonants (the p of "peas and pork," the b of "boiled beef") sound like a peasant's table, and "nothing but" suggests a discipline, almost a fast. Poetry rarely gets food this unpoetic, and that is the point. The ritual starts from what is actually on the plate.
The poem then turns on its two most important lines: "eat with great love, / shit with all imaginable respect." The grammar is parallel, so the two verbs stand level, with neither one nobler than the other. The word "shit" lands hard among the solemn vocabulary, and it is also the poem's quiet argument. The poem never says that what leaves the body returns to the soil, but the reader makes that connection at once. The hyperbole of "all imaginable" is slightly comic, which keeps the reverence from turning pompous. The speaker takes the land seriously without taking himself too seriously.
After this long, rolling sentence, the rhythm collapses into three short lines: "the land / infinite place / rich world." There are no verbs here, only names piled up the way an invocation piles up titles. The word "rich" works twice, meaning wealthy and meaning fertile, which is how a farmer would praise soil. "Infinite" is more startling, since the ground underfoot is something we can walk across, yet the poem makes it as large as the cosmos. A charm calls on a power by naming it, and these lines do exactly that.
The last three lines change the angle. "We" gives way to "I," and the speaker becomes a witness: "I see a man almost drowned in joy / give honor to an oak / with a gilded crown." A water image appears in a poem about earth, as if joy could flood solid ground, and "almost" keeps the feeling believable. The final line is deliberately ambiguous. Does the man crown the oak, or does he honor an oak that already wears gold? Judging by the imagery, the second reading could suggest autumn leaves or light, but the poem does not decide. Either way, "gilded" suggests a plain thing made precious by attention. The word "honor" also completes a ladder of reverence that began with "love" and "respect," moving from the body to the tree.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines vary in length and sound like speech, which suits a poem that distrusts decoration. Sound still binds the ending, though: "drowned" and "crown" chime across the final lines, and "honor," "oak," "drowned" and "crown" gather the same round, open vowels. The effect is a faint click of closure without a rhyme scheme.
The poem matters because it takes an ancient kind of practical magic and relocates it to the present, to meals and toilets and a single tree. It refuses to separate the sacred from the bodily and makes an ecological argument without a single lecture. In this charm, the thing most in need of healing seems to be the speaker's attitude, and the cure is gratitude, applied from the first mouthful to the last.