Dave Bonta's "Man of faith" starts out sounding like a hymn and ends up in a toilet bowl. In under thirty words, a walker in an abbey goes from a serene thought about religion to a catalogue of bodily misery. The poem seems to ask whether faith can survive having a body at all, or whether it has to be lived in one.
Take the opening stanza on its own: "a religion innocent / as the grass / in the abbey I walk." It is calm and almost reverent. The simile is odd, though. Grass has no beliefs and no sins, so a religion "innocent as the grass" would be one with no guilt, doctrine or performance, a faith that simply grows. The abbey adds a hushed, contemplative setting. Everything is lined up for a meditation.
Then the grammar tips the speaker over. The poem is one unpunctuated sentence, and its trick lies in the stanza break. "In the abbey I walk" could be a complete thought, the abbey in which the speaker strolls. But the next line adds "in great pain," and "I walk" turns out to be the start of a new clause. The line has been steering one way and suddenly swerves, much as the speaker's peaceful stroll turns into a limp. The lack of capitals and full stops reinforces this. Nothing stops the slide, and the speaker cannot pause his own discomfort.
What follows is deliberately unglamorous. "Having new shoes on / and heartburn" is bathos, a drop from the sublime to the petty. Spiritual suffering would be grand, but this is the pain of blisters and indigestion. The "and" that links shoes to heartburn makes the two sound equally trivial, as if the speaker were simply listing complaints. The same accumulating "and" returns in the last stanza, which piles up more trouble.
Here the language turns blunt. "A griping belly" is a precise, slightly old-fashioned word for stomach cramps, and it also carries a hint of complaining, since to gripe is to grumble. Whether Bonta intended that is open to debate, but the double meaning suits a speaker who is grumbling his way through a holy place. Then come the two shortest, plainest words in the poem: "making me shit / and vomit." There is no euphemism and no softening. The poem ends on "vomit," a two-syllable word that drops away on its unstressed second beat. It sounds as deflated as it reads.
The structure supports this. Three tercets, no rhyme, no regular metre: the form is as unadorned as the grass. Line lengths shrink as the poem goes on. Each stanza begins with a longer line or two and tapers off, and the last line is among the shortest in the poem. One quiet sound link runs through it as well: "grass," "great," "griping." The hard, rasping *gr* surfaces once in each stanza, as if the pastoral word of the first stanza were slowly turning into the harsh vocabulary of the third.
The title gives the poem its irony. "Man of faith" could be a sincere label, a mock-heroic one, or a self-deprecating one. The speaker is hardly the dignified pilgrim the phrase suggests, yet he is there, walking, in pain. The poem can be read as a joke at the expense of piety, a reminder that no one meditates above their own digestion. It can also be read more generously. If the religion in the first line really is as innocent as grass, then vomit and heartburn belong to it as much as the abbey's lawn does. On that reading, the body is not an interruption of faith but part of its natural setting.
The poem is worth reading for exactly this refusal to settle. It borrows the setting and the cadence of a contemplative poem, then lets the speaker's stomach have the last word. Whether that is satire or honesty is left to the reader, which is why a poem this short stays in the mind.