Pennsylvania means, roughly, "Penn's woods," and Dave Bonta's poem opens by showing what became of the thing the state is named after. The first eight lines read like a chain of consequences. First "axe then lightning on / a million acres of dry slash," then fire, then flood. The poem names the human act, logging, before the natural one. Lightning only finishes what the axe has prepared, since the "slash" is the dry waste left behind. The forests "burned & burned," and the repeated verb with its quick ampersand makes the fire sound endless. Then comes "Then flood": "with no roots / to hold the rains, hillsides slid." The cause is one missing thing, roots, and the damage ends in an ordinary domestic image: "cellars / filled with ashy gray mud." Disaster ends up in people's basements.
Only after this does the lion arrive, and the poem never says outright that the two stories are connected. It doesn't need to. She is "starving, bones / visible under her hide," and the placement tells us what to infer. The destroyed landscape has already taken away whatever she lived on. The line break after "bones" makes the reader see the ribs before learning whose they are.
The poem's second half is about blame. The men who find her do so "at the end of a line / of incriminating footprints." The legal word "incriminating" sounds as if the lion has committed a crime, and the footprints are treated as evidence against her. The men then supply a story: she "had / been prowling around, / had even stalked one of them / the night before." The word "even" shows them stacking up justifications, and "afterwards said" tells us these claims came only once she was dead and could not contradict them. The poem reports their account without endorsing it.
Names matter here too. The lion is "the last lion" and "she," never given a name, while the killer gets a full introduction: "Thomas Anson / was the name of the man / who shot her." The slow, formal phrasing sounds like a record or a plaque, which fits the poem's wry point about memorials. The spot is now called Panther Springs, "what they now call" it. The place is named after the animal that was killed there, so the animal is remembered only through the killing. The sounds seem to carry some of this, with *Pennsylvania*, *prowling*, *Pinnacle*, *Panther* and *pumping* all sharing a hard *p*. That is perhaps a faint echo of the place and its predator being tied together.
The dash before "though she had not" is the poem's turning point. Grammatically the phrase hangs on the naming of Panther Springs, but it also answers the men's claims about prowling and stalking. The ambiguity may be deliberate, because either way the flat denial undercuts the men's story. The poem's narrator, who has been calm and reportorial, steps in for one short line and sides with the animal.
The last three lines show the cruelty. Anson "kept pumping bullets / into her crumpled form / to make damn sure." "Crumpled" shows how little threat remains, since she is already collapsed and starving. "Pumping" turns shooting into something mechanical and excessive. The colloquial "damn sure" sounds almost like Anson's own voice, and it sits against the shaky evidence earlier. The men were uncertain about what the lion had done, but they were certain she must die. The overkill seems driven by fear, or by a need to be done with something that reproaches them.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Its short lines break a plain, almost prose sentence structure into hesitant phrases, and the enjambments ("the rains, hillsides slid," "cellars / filled") give a sense of things giving way. The restraint is what makes it effective. The poem does not lament or lecture and ends without a moral, so the reader has to draw the conclusion. The significance lies in how it connects two kinds of destruction: first a landscape is ruined, then the animal left in the ruin is blamed for being hungry and dangerous. It is an ecological elegy that shows how people turn the consequences of their own actions into a reason for more violence.