Six lines, no capital letters, one colon: into that small space Dave Bonta's "Piety" packs a church, a city, a theatre and a bedroom. The title promises devotion. What the poem delivers is stranger, a hint that devotion, desire and daily routine may be one thing wearing different clothes.
Everything hinges on the first couplet: "church when all is one: / a city of lust." The phrase "when all is one" can be read two ways. It might be a mystical idea, that everything is ultimately united, or it might be the simple moment when a congregation becomes a single body. Either way, the colon works like an equals sign. If all is one, the sacred cannot be fenced off from the carnal, and church becomes "a city of lust." The scale of the image is jarring. A church is one building, while a city is a crowd of strangers, so the word "city" quietly contradicts the "one" before it. This unity turns out to be teeming and multiple. The phrase also seems to tilt against the familiar "city of God", as though the final word has been swapped for something more bodily. Notice, too, that "church" comes without an article. It reads less like a building than a state, something you are in.
The second couplet moves from architecture to theatre, and from space to time. "The plot of yesterday's play / is exactly the same." A church service, like a play, has a script, set roles and an audience, and the poem hints that desire does too. The sentence also contains a gap that does clever work. The plot of yesterday's play is the same as what? The comparison is never finished, so the line enacts the sameness it describes, with yesterday looping back onto yesterday. "Exactly" is a flat, weary word. There is no thrill in this repetition, only a shrug.
In the final couplet the grammar changes. "To pen then to read / and then to bed" has no subject, only infinitives, like a rule of life or a to-do list. A whole day is boiled down to write, read, sleep. The sound tightens here in a way the earlier lines avoid. "Pen" and "then" rhyme exactly, and "then" comes round a second time, so the routine ticks like a clock. The eye also half-expects "read" to rhyme with "bed", as it would if pronounced "red". But the infinitive is spoken "reed", so that echo lives on the page rather than in the ear. Nothing else in the poem rhymes, which makes these small chimes stand out. The lines are very short, between four and seven syllables, and the poem feels as compressed as a note jotted at the end of a day.
The poem also shrinks as it goes. It begins with the cosmic ("all is one"), then moves to the city, the stage, the desk and finally the bed. That last word is double-edged. It is the place of sleep, but it is also the place where the lust of line two would naturally end up. The poem finishes where it began, in a circle, and the circle is itself an example of the repetition it describes.
One reading, which the text supports rather than proves, is that for the speaker piety has become a matter of habit more than belief. Writing and reading, done in the same order each night, become a private liturgy that resembles church as much as church resembles lust. The tone is dry and unadorned, and the poem neither condemns desire nor praises worship. It also refuses to tell us whether the sameness of the days is a sad deadening or a form of faith.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth rereading. With a handful of plain words and almost no punctuation, it makes the reader decide what "piety" means. It could be something lofty, or it could be simply what we do again tomorrow.