After a day shut indoors, the speaker of Dave Bonta's "Rumination" doesn't ask for a walk, a breath of air or a view. He wants to eat. That is the poem's first surprise: the remedy for confinement is not escape but appetite, and what he craves is stranger than any dinner: "a stomach / green and full / as an old religion."
The title does most of the setting-up. In everyday English, rumination means turning a thought over and over in the mind, the kind of brooding that thrives in a room with the door closed. The word is also rooted in the chewing of cud, the way cattle and sheep swallow their food, bring it back up and chew it again. The poem never mentions a cow or a blade of grass, yet the title lets both in. A green, full stomach is what a grazing animal carries, a store of field already gathered. So a mind that has spent the day chewing its own thoughts longs for the real thing, not thinking about the world but the world itself, taken in whole. People do eat the stomachs of animals, so the wish is odd without being absurd.
The poem is built as a single sentence, with no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme. The lines are very uneven, running to roughly seven, twelve, three and six syllables. The long second line stretches out like the day it describes, and then the poem contracts, as if the speaker were swallowing. The line break after "stomach" matters too. For a moment the reader is left with a bare organ, and only then do the words "green and full" arrive and turn it into something living.
The sound of the poem supports that movement. The first two lines are linked by a chain of d's, in "day," "doors" and "desire," which ties the confinement to the craving. "Great" and "green" then echo each other in a hard, hungry g, and the k in "stomach" gives the line a bite. The ending is softer. "Old religion" is slow and rounded, with open vowels and a trailing last syllable, and it is the only phrase in the poem that points to nothing you can touch. After a run of physical words, the poem closes on an abstraction.
The diction is worth noticing as well. "Within doors" is a slightly antique way of saying "indoors," and "a great desire" sounds formal, almost biblical, yet it sits beside the blunt phrase "eat a stomach." That mixture of reverence and rawness prepares the ground for the final comparison. The old-fashioned wording is already pointing toward an old religion before the phrase appears.
The simile is deliberately hard to pin down. Green suggests freshness, growth and the natural world, but a very old thing can also be green with moss or lichen. Full suggests a body well fed, and also a faith crammed with stories, rituals and meaning. Judging by the imagery, the poem hints at a belief rooted in fields and seasons rather than in rooms, though it never says so. Eating adds one more layer. Religions often have meals at their centre, and the poem seems to imagine faith as something taken into the body rather than held in the head. The comparison does not work as logic, and that is the point. It asks to be felt before it is explained.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into four lines. It sets the head against the body and indoors against outdoors, and it suggests that a spiritual need and a physical hunger may be the same one. The poem offers no solution and does not say whether the speaker ever goes out and gets what he wants. It leaves us with the appetite, and with the idea that a person who has thought too long may most need to be fed.