Three forests open DakotaBourff's "Decay," and each is a little darker than the last. First comes a plain "forest," then a "dammed forest," then a "concrete forest," a slide from the natural to the obstructed to the manufactured. The poem never says where any of these places is, and that vagueness gives it force. The forest becomes a shape rather than a location, somewhere you walk into and do not leave unchanged. The central idea follows at once: "All that enters shall decay." Wilderness, flooded valley or city of towers, the rule is the same.
The word "dammed" deserves a pause. Spelled this way, it means held back by a dam: a forest of pooled, stilled water where nothing flows away and everything sits and rots. But the ear also hears "damned," and the poem never quite closes that door. Read both ways, the middle forest is blocked and condemned at once. That makes "concrete" feel like the logical end of the sequence. Concrete is the material people use to defy time, so listing it beside living trees quietly deflates the claim to permanence. The poem lets the city be a forest too, and lets it rot like one.
The second stanza turns from image to statement. "Shall" sounds like a prophecy or a verdict, not a prediction. Then the poem widens the idea: everything will "slowly lose purpose and succomb to the inevitable decay." Decay here is more than physical breakdown. Things lose their reason for being before they lose their shape. The line is the longest in the poem, and its sibilance ("shall slowly lose purpose and succomb") makes it hiss and drag, as if the sentence were itself wearing down. It is also the one place where the poem names its theme outright with the word "inevitable," after which it goes back to bare images.
Those images step down the page. "Decaying flesh." "Withering bones." "Only dust remains." Each line is indented further than the last, so the eye travels diagonally, like something sinking or drifting. "Withering" normally belongs to leaves and flowers, not skeletons, so borrowing a plant's word for bone folds the body and the forest into one picture. The sequence also recalls the familiar funeral phrase about dust, though the poem skips any prayer or mourning. After the dust comes "Wind takes the dust away," and the wind is the only thing in the poem that acts. Everything else is passive, waiting to be changed or carried off. There is no grave and no ceremony, only weather.
Then the opening refrain returns, and the shape is circular. In a real forest, decay feeds new growth, so a cycle might suggest renewal. This poem withholds that comfort. The repeated line is "All that enter shall decay," and this time it is followed by "And no longer remain." That cancels the earlier "Only dust remains," since even the dust is gone. The poem ends by erasing its own last trace. The small shift from "enters" to "enter" may be a slip or a deliberate widening from one traveller to everyone. Either way, the effect is of a rule extending to all.
The form supports this bleakness. There is no rhyme and no steady meter, so nothing chimes and nothing resolves. The rhythm comes from repetition and from short, flat sentences, each sealed by a full stop set apart from the last word by a space. Each statement lands with a small, final click, and the closing ".End." with its period placed in front is the last of these. The voice has no "I" and no consolation, and it offers no explanation of who is speaking or why.
That coldness is the poem's main strength, and the rough edges are part of its texture. A nonstandard spelling like "succomb" would be caught in revision, but the poem's power does not depend on polish. It depends on compression and on a single, unsettling move: putting trees, dams and concrete in the same sentence and giving them the same fate.