A swidden is a patch of land cleared by cutting and burning vegetation so that it can be planted for a time. Dave Bonta's poem never mentions fire, ash or a field. It gives only that unusual word as a title and then six short lines. Everything that follows has to be read as happening on, or in the shadow of, such a plot. The speaker seems to be working the ground and, at the same moment, noticing how little of the world he actually touches. The central idea, as I read it, is that our tools and containers bring us closer to nature and also hold it off. That gap is odd enough to be worth a poem.
The first couplet is a small, odd loss: "last night's rain / missed my lips." We usually miss a bus or a kiss, and we miss a mouthful when we try to drink. Rain that "missed my lips" is therefore treated as something almost intimate that failed to arrive. The phrase "last night's" puts the event firmly in the past, so the speaker has already lost his chance. The grammar is a little playful too, since the rain does the missing, as if it were a clumsy visitor. Under that lightness is thirst, the wish to take the weather in directly through the mouth.
The second couplet answers the loss with a strange kind of ownership: "I have the weather / in a bag now." Nearly every word here is one syllable, and "weather" is the only exception. That plainness makes the claim sound deadpan, almost childlike, which is where its charm lies. The poem never says what is in the bag. It might be seed, damp earth, ash or something else, and the vagueness seems deliberate. We can't tell what the bag holds, but we can tell that weather doesn't fit in one. "Now" matters too. It suggests a compensation, a sense that having missed the rain, the speaker has settled for a container.
The last couplet turns toward the ground and has the most interesting grammar. "stranger than feet in the dirt / this thin hoe" is a comparison with no verb, and its subject turns up only in the final line. The hoe arrives last, like a small object placed carefully on a table. Feet in the dirt are the most direct contact a person can have with soil, and the hoe stands in for that contact. It is useful, but it is also a thin stick pushed between the person and the earth, and the poem calls that "stranger." The word "thin" is a surprising choice, since we might expect a hoe to be heavy or sharp. It makes the tool seem fragile, almost a line scratched on the ground. It also echoes the poem's own narrow lines.
The form supports this reading. There are three unrhymed couplets with no punctuation and no capital letters, so one thought slides into the next. The line lengths are very uneven. By my count the first couplet has three syllables per line, the second has five and four, and the third has seven and then three. The poem stretches toward the long line about the feet and then snaps shut on "this thin hoe," a stop that feels almost abrupt. The sound repeats a little as well. The short *i* in "missed," "lips," "this" and "thin" links the opening to the ending, and the hoe seems to answer the lips across the poem. The poem also moves downward, from rain in the sky to a bag held in the hand to dirt underfoot. The body appears only at its two extremes, mouth and feet, and the tools and containers sit awkwardly between them.
Part of the poem's value is how much it does with so little. It doesn't lecture about nature or lament modern life, though a reader worried about distance from the land could easily hear that worry in it. It lets one odd comparison do the work. The title, with its suggestion of land used and then left, adds a sense that human contact with the earth is temporary and mediated. A reader comes away with a question rather than a moral: what does it mean to "have" the weather, and why does the simple tool in our hands feel stranger than the bare foot it replaced?