A million is a number nobody can actually see, and Dave Bonta starts with it anyway. "One million beetles / hiding under / one million leaves" is less a count than a feeling of scale. The neat one-to-one pairing, a beetle for every leaf, makes the infestation sound orderly, almost tender, as if each insect had been handed its own roof. The word "hiding" gives the beetles a faint guilt, as though they know what they are doing. And what they are doing is the poem's real subject: a slow, enormous, patient destruction of a black locust grove, carried out by creatures small enough to sit on a person's head.
The second stanza shows the result. "Skeletonized" is the longest word in the poem, and it stretches the middle line to seven syllables between two short ones, so the line itself looks stripped and bony. Then comes "hiss," a word that sounds like what it names. The s sounds run through the stanza (locust, leaves, skeletonized, hiss), so the wind passing through ruined leaves becomes a kind of whispering voice. There is also a coincidence of names that the poem never comments on but a reader can hardly miss. "Locust" is the tree, but it is also the insect that has long stood for devastation. The beetles are doing a locust's work on a locust tree.
The third stanza plays with word order. "Already brown / before the storm toppled it / black locust limb" withholds its noun until the last line, so we hear about the brownness and the storm before we learn what fell. The word "already" matters most. The storm is the dramatic event, the one a casual observer would blame, but the limb was dying before it arrived. The poem does not say the beetles caused this, and a careful reader should note that. It simply places the stanza after the skeletonized leaves and lets us draw the connection. The suggestion is that the loud disaster arrives late and the quiet one has already done the work.
Then the poem zooms in. The million becomes "a leafminer beetle," and the grove becomes "my thinning scalp." Until now the speaker has been a silent observer, and here the speaker is suddenly a body, and an ageing one. "Thinning" echoes "skeletonized," so the speaker's hair loss is quietly matched with the stripped leaves. The beetle lands on the speaker as it would on any other bit of vegetation, and the comedy of that, a small humiliation with a hint of kinship, keeps the poem from becoming a lecture. The closing line, "black locust grove," repeats the "black locust" of the stanza before and widens the view back out, so the poem ends by putting the speaker inside the damaged place, not outside it.
Formally, the poem is spare. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter, only four three-line stanzas that resemble haiku in their compression, though the syllable counts wander (the first stanza runs about 5-4-4, the second 3-7-4). The title is just three asterisks, a mark rather than a name, which sends the reader straight into the images. Each stanza closes on a concrete noun (leaves, wind, limb, grove), something you could point to. Sound ties the poem together as well. The long *ee* of "beetles," "leaves," "skeletonized" and "leafminer" returns again and again, and the l of "million," "locust," "limb," "lands" and "leafminer" keeps the word "leaf" echoing under everything.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles damage. It never says "ecological crisis" or draws a moral. It shows harm at three scales, the swarm, the fallen limb and the single insect, and lets the reader feel how gradual and ordinary it is. By ending on the speaker's own thinning head, it suggests that decay in the grove and decay in a human body belong to the same unhurried process. That turns an observation about trees into something more personal, and a little funnier and sadder than the opening million would lead you to expect.