Six lines, no capital letters and not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's "Bringing the noise" looks like a note scribbled in a hurry, yet it holds a whole life, from first cry to first act of faith. The poem gives us no setting beyond the speaker's own body, so it is best read exactly as it stands.
Start with the title. "Bringing the noise" is a casual, swaggering phrase, the kind you might use of someone who arrives loudly and means to be noticed. Placed above a poem about beginnings, it becomes a joke with a serious edge, because a newborn is the original noisemaker. The first line, "the din at my beginning," never says whose din it is. It could be the baby's own howl, the commotion of the room, or the roar of a world the baby is being pushed into. The line has no verb, so the noise just hangs there, as unavoidable as it must feel to someone who has only just arrived.
Then comes "little head out / to eat joy." Judging by the imagery, this is a birth, a small head emerging. It also resembles a nestling or a burrowing animal poking up with its mouth open. The surprise is the verb. Joy is abstract, and the poem makes it food. "Eat" gives the speaker an appetite before language or a full body, as if the first instinct were not to understand the world but to swallow it. "Little" does the work of a whole sentence about vulnerability, and the speaker is reduced to a head.
The second stanza turns inward and is harder to pin down: "must leave the remainder of me / to hear and believe / in the attempt." With no stated subject, "must leave" can be read two ways. The head, having gone out to eat joy, may have to leave the rest of the body, the "remainder," behind. Or "leave" may mean entrust: the speaker must hand what is left of themself over to listening and faith. Either way, the self is split into a part that ventures and a part that waits, and the waiting part gets two jobs. To "hear" sends us back to the din of line one, so the noise at the start becomes something to listen through. To "believe" is the leap, but the object of that belief is modest. It is not success or happiness but "the attempt," the trying itself.
"Attempt" also has a literary pull, since an essay is, at root, an attempt. The poem may be pointing at itself, six lines trying to catch a beginning. That is an inference, but the poem's tentative, unfinished look supports it.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but there is a quiet design. Counting syllables, the first stanza runs seven, four, three, and the second runs eight, five, four. Each stanza tapers from a long line to a tiny closing phrase, like a funnel, or a narrow passage the speaker squeezes through. The shortest lines, "to eat joy" and "in the attempt," land hard because the longer line before each has built up room. Long *e* sounds also run through the poem: "eat," "leave," "me," "hear," "believe." "Leave" and "believe" almost echo each other, as if departure and faith belonged together. The lowercase letters and missing punctuation add to the breathlessness. Nothing separates noise from hunger from belief, so they arrive in one rush, the way they might for someone newly born.
The poem matters because it is so small and still leaves so much open. It avoids the sentimental picture of a gentle beginning. Here the start of life is loud, greedy and incomplete, a head out in the world while the rest of the self waits behind. What carries the speaker forward is not certainty but willingness to listen and to trust the effort. A missing subject, an odd verb like "eat joy," and a title borrowed from everyday speech are enough to make six lines feel larger than they look. The poem also leaves a question for the reader: when we begin something, which part of us goes out, and which part has to stay behind and believe?