A beetle trudging through dirt is given the full treatment of myth in Dave Bonta's "Scarab", and then it is given a one-word order. The scene is simple. A dung beetle pushes its ball of dung along the ground, moving backwards, as these insects do. But the poem won't leave this as natural history. In a few lines the creature becomes a sex object, a prisoner and a deity, and the central idea comes from the collision of those roles. Dignity and degradation are not opposites here. They are one thing seen from two angles.
The poem is a single sentence, seventeen lines long, and its construction does a lot of the work. Lines rarely run past three or four syllables, so the text becomes a narrow column that tumbles downward like the ball it describes. The opening, "Hard / & round / & shiny as," piles up qualities with ampersands, each fragment adding a layer the way a beetle might add dung. The simile that lands, "a sex toy", is deliberately undignified. It is funny, and also accurate in a way that takes you by surprise, because a polished beetle shell really does have that glossy, manufactured look. The next image, "studded collar / biting into / the dirt", pushes the same impulse further. A collar suggests leather, bondage and ownership. The poem never says who holds the leash, and that gap matters later.
The sound of the language is as blunt as the animal. Hard consonants run through the poem: "Hard," "studded," "dirt," "plods," "god." The d's thud like small footfalls. Only one moment of softness interrupts them, "the translucent / hum of / his wings / folded away." Here the vowels lengthen and the lines almost shimmer. The beetle has a flier's equipment, delicate wings tucked under its hard casing, yet it spends its life on the ground. That is a quiet pang inside a crude poem. The lines tell us there is grace in this creature and that it has been put away for the sake of the job.
Then comes the pivot, "the six- / legged god". The line break after the hyphen makes us wait for the noun, and when "god" arrives it is almost shocking. Scarabs were sacred to the ancient Egyptians, who saw in the rolling ball a picture of the sun being pushed across the sky, and Bonta's word calls up that history without lecturing about it. But the god is immediately made to "plod backwards," a verb that is heavy and unglamorous. He is not even facing where he is going. His great task is "wheeling his / little world / of shit." The phrase "little world" is the poem's neatest turn. It makes the dung ball a planet and the beetle an Atlas or a creator-figure, while the final word, plain and one syllable, refuses to let anyone feel too grand. The rhythm of the last three lines rolls forward and then drops on that word.
The poem could end there, as a clever joke about sacred and profane. Instead it adds a stanza of one word: "Submit." It rhymes with "shit," so the sound of the ending clicks shut like a trap. The word is also an imperative, and it is unclear who is giving the order and who is receiving it. The collar and sex-toy imagery hint at erotic submission. The god-language suggests religious surrender. The beetle, hauling its burden backwards, seems to submit to instinct, labour and the ordinary indignity of staying alive. And the reader may be the one being addressed, told to accept that the sublime and the filthy are bound together.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. It borrows the weight of an ancient symbol, adds a modern joke, and leaves the central tension unresolved. It doesn't sneer at the beetle or sentimentalise it. It leaves us laughing, a little uneasy, and oddly respectful of an insect that does its work without complaint.