Four short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation: Bonta's "Turning" is built so lightly that it feels more like a glance than a statement. A community goes to church, the leaves change colour, and the poem quietly decides that the two things belong together. What it offers is a feeling more than an argument. Autumn is the season of loss, and cold does something to that loss that the poem calls, strangely and precisely, mordanting.
The first stanza gives us a scene without finishing it. "where we go to church" is a clause left hanging, as if the poem began mid-thought, and "leaves turning" arrives as a bare, verbless fragment. It is only two words, so it hangs on the page the way a leaf hangs before it drops. The title makes "turning" do a great deal of work. Leaves turn colour, seasons turn, and people turn toward faith. Wine turns, too, if left too long. The poem never says which of these it means, and the word keeps all of them open. There is also a small sound-link: "church" and "turning" share the same vowel, so the opening lines seem to lean toward each other.
The second stanza changes mode. After a picture comes a simile: "the north is like a mordant." A mordant is a substance used in dyeing to fix colour into cloth so that it won't wash out. The word comes from the idea of biting, and it carries that edge into everyday English, where "mordant" also describes cutting, caustic wit. Both meanings fit. The cold that arrives from the north bites, and, in the poem's image, it also sets the colour of the leaves, making a landscape out of something like a dye-vat. The implication is that the loss does not fade. It is made permanent and vivid.
That loss is "wine-laden," and the compound is richer than it looks. "Laden" suggests weight, like a loaded cart or a vine bent under fruit. Wine ties the line back to the church of the first stanza, since the setting suggests communion, and it also gives a colour, the deep red and purple of turning leaves. So the leaves, the ritual and the grief are all stained with the same thing. The poem never says who or what has been lost. The pronouns "we" and "our" suggest the loss is shared, but the poem leaves its cause unnamed, and that restraint is part of its effect. The reader supplies the particular sorrow.
The poem has no rhyme in the traditional sense, but it is full of quiet sound-echoes. "North" and "mordant" share a vowel, "wine" and "like" share a long *i*, and the *l* of "laden" slides straight into the *l* of "loss." That soft alliteration slows the ending, and the poem closes on a hushed, hissing "loss." The line lengths matter as well. The first stanza runs about five syllables, then three. The second stretches to roughly seven, then six. The thought that begins as a brief observation grows heavier and more complicated, as though the figure of speech needed more room than the plain scene.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. It takes a technical word from the craft of dyeing and uses it to say something about grief that direct statement could not. Loss here is not something dissolving with time. It is being fixed, deepened and made colourful, and the poem lets that be both beautiful and bitter. The lack of a final full stop adds to this, because the poem ends mid-motion, still turning. It does not console, and it does not resolve. It stands in a churchyard, or near one, and watches the colours set.