Nobody in Amy's "Them" is allowed to stand outside the crime. On the surface the poem is a short elegy for disappearing wildlife and wild places. Its real business is blame. It begins by lamenting something "slowly dying," then closes every escape route until the only honest response is the blunt "We need to act." The title sets a trap. "Them" is the word we use to point at somebody else, and the poem spends its length turning that pointing finger around.
The opening stanza works by drift. "Years of wandering aimlessly, / Or purposely through the moss / Through the trees" gives us a walker who is never named and whose movement either has a goal or doesn't. The poem doesn't seem to care which. The suggestion, as I read it, is that whether we drift through the natural world or stride through it with intent, the damage goes on. The setting is soft and close-up, all moss and trees, and then the sentence swerves into "Years of history / Slowly dying." Calling the loss "history" makes nature something with a long past, not just scenery. The drawn-out -ly adverbs (aimlessly, purposely, slowly) give the stanza a weary drone. "Slowly dying" appears twice. The first time it stands alone as an unattributed fact. The second time it picks up "because of us," and the fact acquires a culprit.
That phrase drives the second stanza: "Because of us. / Because of you. / Because of me. / Because of them." There are four short lines, one repeated opening, and a carefully ordered run of pronouns. It starts with a collective "us," turns to the reader with "you," admits the speaker with "me," and only at the very end lets in "them," the people we might have preferred to blame. Placing "them" last loops the poem back to its title. The word that sounded like an accusation turns out to be one name on a list that includes everyone.
The third stanza moves from argument to image. "Birds used to reign the skies; / Now, these metallic vultures reign the airs." The verb "reign" is repeated and handed from one ruler to another, as though a coup had taken place. The "metallic vultures" are presumably aircraft, and the metaphor is the poem's boldest stroke. Vultures are scavengers that gather around death, so the image hints at machines hovering over a world already dying. The pointing word "these" makes them feel visible overhead. The plural "airs" is unusual, and it gives the line a slightly strange, stumbling sound.
The stanza then maps the whole living world in three strokes: sky for the birds, forest for the orang-utans, sea for the manatees. Both animals are widely known to be under threat, so the examples are well chosen. "Trees" and "seas" make the poem's one clear rhyme. It is a gentle, almost nursery-rhyme chime, and the phrase "used to" undercuts it by turning the lines into memory. "Trees" also echoes the first stanza's "Through the trees," so the forest we wandered through reappears as something already half lost.
The last stanza strips the imagery away. "No more excuses / Or ignorance: / We need to act." The colon works like a drumroll before the command, and "We" brings back the "us" of the opening. The poem is free verse with no regular metre, but its shape still tells a story. The stanzas shrink from six lines to four, then four, then three, so the poem seems to tighten as it nears its demand. Short lines such as "Slowly dying" and "Or ignorance:" act as pauses, almost as held breaths.
Some readers may find the final line plain, closer to a slogan than to the imagery before it. That plainness looks deliberate. After the vultures and the manatees, ornament would feel like another excuse. The poem is worth reading because it understands how blame usually behaves: we export it to "them." It uses pronouns, the smallest words in the language, to bring that blame back to the reader.