Dave Bonta's "Natural piety" is only six lines long, but it asks a question big enough to unsettle a whole life: who was I when I lived entirely through appetite? The speaker looks back at an earlier self who was "too free," who lived "in the city of desire," who had nothing "in my head" because "my belly was it." The poem never says whether it feels shame, envy or tenderness toward that person, and that withheld verdict gives it its tension.
The first couplet is slippery. "who was I being too free" has no question mark and no capital letter, so it reads less like a question asked aloud than one turning over in the mind. The phrase "being too free" holds two meanings. Free can mean liberated, but "too free" also suggests loose or excessive, the way a disapproving relative might use the word. We cannot tell whether that judgment is the speaker's own or an old reproach still echoing. "The city of desire" turns a feeling into a place. Desire is not something the speaker had but somewhere he lived, crowded and easy to get lost in.
The second couplet sets head against belly, the oldest quarrel between mind and body. Most lines in the poem run six or seven syllables, but "before having anything in my head" swells to ten, as if the line filled up with the very clutter it says was missing. The next line then drops to a blunt, almost monosyllabic thud: "when my belly was it." That small word "it" carries a great deal. It can mean the head, the self, or the whole of life. The belly did not merely influence the speaker; it took over every role.
Then the poem leaves the city. "like the raw ground in fields / wanton with sun and sleep" is its only simile, and it changes the setting from streets to soil. "Raw" suggests land never ploughed, but also something tender and exposed. "Wanton" is the richest word in the poem. It carries a moral charge, meaning sexually loose, yet it also has an older sense of growing unchecked and luxuriant, as weeds and wildflowers do. Placing it in a field takes the sting out of the accusation. Nobody calls a meadow sinful. The ground is "wanton with sun and sleep," at once heated and drowsy, receptive and passive. Nothing in the picture works: no plough, no farmer, no thought.
The title explains why the poem moves this way. "Natural piety" is a phrase many readers will recognise from the close of Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up," where he hopes his days will be "bound each to each by natural piety." Judging by the title, Bonta's poem answers that line. Wordsworth's piety joins the grown man to a child's wonder at the world outside. Here the reverence seems turned inward, toward the body's old, unreflecting hunger. Read this way, "wanton" stops sounding like a sin. The belly's surrender to sun and sleep becomes a kind of faith, and "piety" becomes an unexpected word for what the speaker once was.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, so the six lines run on like one unbroken thought. But the long *e* of "free" in the first line returns in "sleep," the final word, so the poem begins in freedom and ends in sleep, with the same vowel bridging the two. Soft *w* sounds ("who," "was," "when," "was," "wanton," "with") murmur through the lines and give them a drowsy, half-remembered texture.
The poem's quiet strength is that it never settles its own question. The speaker moves from a city, a human construction, to a field, and the shift suggests he cannot fix that earlier self in one image. The self was social and appetitive, but also natural and unthinking. By ending on a picture instead of a conclusion, the poem lets the reader feel what it is to remember a time before the head took charge, without being told whether to regret it or to long for it.