The poem opens on a pronoun with nothing to point at. "We grow crazy / waiting for it": the reader is pulled into the speaker's longing before being told what is longed for. Dave Bonta never fills the gap. A few lines later "it" is something sick nature "gives to us," as if the thing awaited and the thing endured were the same. Is "it" spring, rescue, judgment, sleep? The poem lets each possibility hang, and that suspended, uneasy waiting is its real subject.
The title explains the method. "(Re)turning" puts a prefix in brackets, so the word can mean turning or turning back, and the poem uses both senses. "I turn and turn with the clock" suggests a sleepless body rolling over as the hours pass, but also time's own circling. The last line, "I turn all night," completes the loop, so the poem ends where it began, still waiting. The turning also reaches into the religious vocabulary. "Repent" is often understood as a turning round, a change of direction, so when the speaker says "we could repent still," the title is already quietly there. The question is whether turning is a spiritual act or only a restless one.
The middle of the poem takes on a darker, stranger tone. Nature is "sick," and we are "her bastards," illegitimate children of an ailing mother. The word suggests we are unwanted yet unable to disown her. The next lines are hard to untangle on purpose: we "believe in a Lord / with her mouth." Judging by the syntax, even our faith is spoken through nature, borrowed from the body, and not purely spiritual. Right after, hope is shrunk by a line break: "who have little / reason to hope," where "little" sits stranded at the end of its line, as small as the hope it describes.
Then comes the poem's cleverest pun: we could repent "or so gravity tells me." Gravity means seriousness, but it is also the force that pulls things down, and the next stanza follows it: "I fell into my creature parts." The fall has an old religious ring, yet what the speaker falls into is the animal body, not sin as such. The "raw remonstrance" that follows is a protest or reproach, and the phrase reads as bodily as it does moral. The war then "writes itself / in our many-necked Mayday." It is hard to be certain what the poem intends, but "Mayday" can hold both a spring festival and the distress call, and "many-necked" suggests a crowd, or perhaps a hydra. If so, spring, celebration and emergency are tangled together, and the war is a text nobody authors, which writes itself.
The form enacts this unease. There are nine unrhymed couplets, with no punctuation and no capital letters, so sentences spill over the stanza breaks and the reader never gets a place to rest. The long chain of "who" clauses ("who believe… who have… who could repent") builds like an accusation, yet it never lands on a verb for the "bastards" to act on. The sound is clipped and heavy, mostly short words. Phrases like "raw remonstrance," "war writing" and "many-necked Mayday" use alliteration to give the harsher lines a grinding, muttering quality. The final image, "mind driving hard over the stones," turns thought into a cart rattling over rough ground, and the stones jolt a sleepless head just as the wheels of the earlier turning would.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few lines without explaining any of it. Ecological sickness, religious guilt, political violence and plain insomnia are folded into one night's restlessness, and no one of them is allowed to be the answer. The poem does not tell us whether repentance, a sick nature or a distant war is to blame. Instead it makes us feel what waiting for an unnamed "it" is like: the sleepless turning that goes on after every explanation has failed.