Four lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and still the poem manages a small act of betrayal. It begins by promising something solemn, with a title that means a sworn vow, and ends by admitting that vows can't do the one thing they exist to do. Dave Bonta's "Oaths" says that words can fasten themselves to us for life, but they can't make us keep faith.
The opening line, "water of many places", is the oddest, because it attaches to nothing. It has no verb and no clear subject, so it hangs there like a label or an address. The next line suggests what it is addressing: "these words come with arms." If the words are water, they are fluid and unowned. They take the shape of whatever place they pass through and travel between countries, languages and mouths. That fits oaths, which are made in courtrooms, churches, kitchens and on battlefields, and sound much alike in all of them. The poem never says which water or which places, and the vagueness widens its reach. The oaths belong to everyone and nowhere in particular.
The word "arms" is where the poem pivots, because it holds two meanings at once. Arms can embrace, so the words arrive like someone reaching out to hold us. Arms are also weapons, and the word also calls up "taking up arms", the soldier's oath. The line lets the tender and violent readings sit together without choosing. That ambiguity matches the experience of promising, since a vow can feel like love and like a restraint at the same moment. Notice, too, the verb "come". The words approach and arrive. We don't pick them up so much as receive them, and the poem quietly makes us the ones acted upon.
Then comes the sentence that the whole poem has been leaning toward: "and damn us to remember". "Damn" is a pointed choice. It is a curse word, and the poem's title already hints at that second sense of "oath", the blurted swearing of a person in a temper. It is also the language of judgment and sentence. Remembering is presented as punishment, not as a gift or a duty. Once the words have been spoken, they can't be unheard, and the speaker is stuck with them.
The final line undoes the expectation that remembering and keeping faith go together: "but not to be faithful." The grammar is built on a neat parallel, "to remember" against "to be faithful", and the small word "but" lets the first half collapse. Memory is automatic and happens to us. Fidelity has to be chosen again and again, and the poem suggests no oath can do that choosing for us. The stress pattern supports this. The line falls into "but NOT to be FAITHful", so the negative gets the heaviest beat just before the poem ends on the soft, trailing syllables of "faithful". The word describing loyalty is the quietest sound in the poem.
The poem has no rhyme, but sound still ties it together. The w of "water" returns in "words" and "with", which gives the first two lines a faint, liquid kinship, as if the words really were the water. The line lengths run roughly seven, five, seven and six syllables, so the short second line, made almost entirely of monosyllables, hits hardest. "These words come with arms" is clipped and blunt, a small image with real weight. The lack of punctuation has a similar effect. Nothing marks where one thought stops, so the lines drift into one another like water, which suits a poem whose first image is liquid. The line break after "remember" does the cruelest work. The sentence could end there, as a plain sentence of doom, and the hope-killing "but" arrives only on the next line.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so little space. It doesn't tell us who swore the oath, who was betrayed, or what was promised, and that absence invites us to supply our own. A wedding vow, a pledge of allegiance and a childhood promise all fit the pattern the poem describes, and each can be remembered long after it has stopped being kept. Its quiet insight is that language has power over memory but not over the will, and that the most binding words we speak may leave us bound only to the memory of having said them.