Most elegies start with a death. Dave Bonta's poem starts with a missing body. Run the title into the first line and you get one flat sentence: "The last lion in Pennsylvania was never found." There is no trophy, no skeleton, no final sighting. Having left the animal unaccounted for, the poem spends its remaining lines deciding where she went. Its first answer is surprisingly tender: she went into the woods themselves.
The verbs do most of the work. Beetles "smuggled her / underground," a word that makes the lion sound like a fugitive hidden by sympathetic accomplices. Their "Black-&-yellow" colouring has the look of small warning signs. Then "trees took / her up," and the line break lifts her at the very moment of "took." In two short beats she is buried and raised. What follows is almost playful. Her ears became "among other things" leaves, and that casual aside, tucked between dashes, hints at far more transformations than the poem has time to list. Her roar is "reborn in / the tops of tall pines," which asks us to hear wind in the branches as an old voice. Best of all is "She ran in the sap." Sap runs, and so did the lion. One verb joins the fast animal to the slow movement of fluid through wood, and it suggests her speed has not been lost, only slowed to the pace of a tree.
If the poem stopped there, it would be a consoling fable about nature recycling its own. But the word "But" turns it. She "traveled, too, / into the ravenous / stomachs of the deer." The line break leaves "ravenous" hanging at the end of a line, so the hunger arrives before its object does. The deer "were no longer / the wary creatures / she used to stalk." Without a predator they have lost their caution, and they eat. The lion is now inside the animal she once hunted, and she experiences the forest as it is being eaten. The poem never names the idea, but it fits a familiar one from ecology: where large predators vanish, deer can strip a woodland of its young growth. "Explored" is a curious verb here. It gives the ghost curiosity, even dignity, while what she finds is bleak: "a growing emptiness."
The final image, "a desert with trees…", is the sharpest. It is an oxymoron that works as plain description. A forest can look intact from a distance, with its canopy still green, while beneath it nothing new grows. The ellipsis refuses to close the thought. It is the only mark of its kind in the poem, and it leaves the emptiness still spreading.
The form suits this mix of calm and unease. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Lines are mostly a few words long, so the poem moves quietly, as a stalking animal might. The ampersands, in "Black-&-yellow" and "& her roar," give the voice a casual, notebook-like feel, which helps strange claims sound matter-of-fact. The early sentences are short and declarative, close to a folk tale in tone. Sounds soften the transformation, with the rolling r's of "roar was reborn" and the hush of "ran in the sap." The closing sentence has no full stop, so the poem ends on a trailing note.
The poem avoids both usual ways of mourning an extinction. It builds no monument and assigns no blame. It follows the loss through the food chain instead, and the lion's absence turns out to have consequences. Consolation and warning sit side by side without being reconciled: she lives on in leaf, sap and wind, and her disappearance is also what hollows the woods out. In under twenty lines, a missing animal becomes a way of seeing a whole ecosystem, and the reader is left to decide whether being everywhere is the same as being present.