Seven short lines carry us from near-reverence to a bathroom joke, and the surprise is that the joke spoils nothing. Dave Bonta's "Part of the solution" starts with a scene nature poems love: a dry spell finally broken, rain falling in the dark, the air suddenly worth breathing. Then the speaker admits what he actually does about it. He keeps going outside to pee off the porch.
The first five lines form one long sentence, built around a single sense. Because it is night, the speaker can't watch the rain, only smell it. "Smells so fresh" is deliberately plain. The "so" sounds like something said aloud to someone in the next room, not polished for the page, and that plainness lets the specifics do the work. They arrive as a short list joined by ampersands: "wet leaves & ozone / & the soil coming to life." The ampersand is quick and notebook-like, and placing it at the start of the fifth line makes the list tumble forward, one smell piling onto another. "Leaves" is familiar and natural, while "ozone" is almost scientific, the sharp, clean note people associate with air around a storm. Between them they cover sky and ground. Then comes the emotional peak, "the soil coming to life." The earth is personified, and after "weeks of drought" the phrase carries a faint sense of revival without any grand vocabulary. The sentence even runs from problem to answer, opening on "drought" and closing on "life."
Then the grammar shifts. The full stop after "life" is the poem's only real break, and the second sentence is shorter, in the first person, and flatly domestic: "I keep going outside / to pee off the porch." Until now the speaker has been invisible, a nose and little else. Suddenly there is a body. The line break does the comic work. "I keep going outside" leaves a gap where we might expect "to listen" or "to breathe it in," and the next line fills it with something much earthier. The verb "keep" matters too. It implies repeated trips, a happy kind of restlessness, as if the rain has made it impossible to stay in bed. Judging by the tone, the errand may also be half a pretext, a perfectly good excuse to stand in that smell.
Sound supports the joke. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, the words mostly one or two syllables, and the whole thing reads like speech. That gives the final line extra force. "Keep," "pee" and "porch" make a run of plosive p sounds that pop like drops hitting a roof, and the long e of "leaves," "keep" and "pee" quietly echoes across the poem, tying the lyrical opening to its blunt ending.
The title seems to borrow the familiar slogan about being either part of the solution or part of the problem, and the poem makes it literal. The problem is dryness, and the speaker's contribution is, quite literally, a little more liquid for the soil. The joke is self-mocking, since one person's gesture is laughably small beside a weather system. Yet there is a serious edge beneath it. Humans are so often cast as the problem where the environment is concerned. Here the human body is a modest participant in the cycle of water, not an outsider commenting from behind dry glass.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It refuses the pose of the detached observer. The speaker doesn't stand on the porch admiring the night. He adds himself to it. Humor makes that closeness feel honest rather than preachy, and the structure shows why. The tenderness of the first sentence is what makes the second one funny, and the second makes the first believable. The poem suggests that belonging to the natural world needs no solemnity, only attention and a willingness to be a little silly at midnight.