Nature, in Dave Bonta's "Cravings", never gets a main verb. "Nature fashioning teeth for flesh" hangs in mid-air, an action with no beginning or end, as if the shaping of appetite were still going on while we read. The poem is only eight lines long and has no punctuation or capital letters, yet it travels a long way: from the workshop where predators are made, to love, to the sea, and finally to a glass of whisky.
The first stanza is built on repetition. "Teeth for flesh", "teeth for teeth", "teeth for love": the same grammar three times, with a different appetite each time. The first is plain biology, jaws made for eating. The second echoes the old phrase about an eye for an eye, and it is deliberately slippery. It could mean rivals armed against rivals, or revenge answering violence. The third line is the surprise. Teeth are also for biting a lip, a nibbled shoulder, the hungry side of tenderness. By giving all three the same frame, the poem suggests that eating, fighting and loving are one craving wearing different clothes. The rhythm helps. A long first line, eight syllables with a rolling opening, is followed by two short, heavy lines that land like bites. The word "teeth" appears four times, and it is hard to say aloud without pressing your tongue against the very thing it names.
Then the poem swerves. "White horses / going and coming" is a two-line stanza, the shortest in the poem, and it moves us from the mouth to the sea, since "white horses" is a familiar name for breaking waves. The pivot still feels connected to what came before. Judging by the imagery, the whiteness may carry over from teeth to foam, and a line of surf can look like a row of bared teeth. The phrase "going and coming" is also a small reversal of the usual "coming and going". Putting departure first suggests that what matters is the loss, the ebbing, and that the return is almost a relief. This is how cravings behave. They are satisfied, they withdraw, they come back. The stanza's brevity works like a pause between waves.
The last stanza is the cleverest. "Lessen the distance / to joy" has no stated subject, so we cannot be sure what does the lessening. It might be the waves, the cravings themselves, or the reader being gently told what to do. The line break matters too: "to joy" sits alone, the biggest word on the smallest line, held out like something just out of reach. Then the final line deflates it: "or the odd scotch". The drop from joy to a drink is funny, and the word "odd" adds to the joke, meaning both "occasional" and faintly peculiar. The little word "or" can be read two ways. Either the scotch is an alternative route to joy, or it is joy's modest stand-in. Either way, the poem measures the distance to a transcendent feeling and the distance to a nightcap in the same units.
That tonal slide, from evolution to the pub, is the poem's real subject. Bonta does not moralise about appetite or treat craving as a flaw to be cured. The plural title, "Cravings", suggests many wants, recurring like the tide. The poem presents them as part of nature's workmanship, the same energy that grew teeth in the first place. Love and violence come from one source, and so do a lofty longing and a small vice. A reader might expect either solemnity or a warning, and the wry final line offers neither. It gently admits that we are animals with, at best, good taste in whisky.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. With no rhyme, no fixed metre and almost no connecting words, it relies on repetition, image and the gaps between stanzas. We have to supply the links: teeth to waves, waves to wanting, wanting to the glass. It is compressed in a way that shares something with haiku, but its humour is distinctly its own. The shift in the last line from awe to a shrug shows a speaker who takes desire seriously enough to see it everywhere and lightly enough to laugh at where it ends up.