Most nature poems ask us to look up at the stars or kneel before a mountain. Dave Bonta's "Clearing" notices something humbler: the moment a blocked head opens and air moves freely again. In nine short lines, a gust of wind, a restless hillside and a fading cold become a small celebration of simply being alive.
The poem opens with a joke. "Trees sway like drunks" is an irreverent simile, dragging the woods down to the pavement outside a pub at closing time. It is also exact. Drunks lurch, lean, recover and overcorrect, just as branches do in a gust. After the dash comes a fragment: "the clacking of their branches." It has no verb, as if the speaker's ear caught the noise before the grammar could catch up. "Clacking" is hard and percussive, with two k-sounds snapping like wood on wood, and it is the harshest sound in the poem. That matters, because the poem ends somewhere much softer.
In the second stanza the view widens. "The whole hillside / is in motion around me" puts the speaker at a still centre while everything else moves. Then the line breaks do something clever. When we read "standing here with my head cold," the break lets "head cold" sound for a moment like a cold head, or a head at the centre of a spinning world. Only after the stanza break does "almost gone" arrive and turn the phrase into an illness. The reader has to wait across the white space for the good news, which mimics the slow lifting of a cold. Judging by the imagery, the drunken trees may also carry a trace of the speaker's own light-headedness. Anyone who has just recovered from being ill knows how unsteady and slightly unreal the world can feel. The poem hints at this without spelling it out.
The title does triple duty. A clearing is an open space among trees, so it names the hillside where the speaker stands. It is also what happens to blocked sinuses. And it describes a mind coming back into focus. The present participle matters too: "Clearing" is a process, and the cold is "almost" gone, not gone. The poem catches a moment of change rather than a finished result.
Wind and breath quietly echo each other, since both are air in motion. The gust that shakes the hillside and the breath the speaker draws in are the same material. Without saying so, the poem lets the speaker join the landscape's movement. The hillside is moving air, and now so is the speaker.
The form is plain and conversational. There are three tercets, no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short and uneven, closer to speech than to song. The last stanza is the plainest of all: "How marvelous it is / just to breathe." The only elevated word is "marvelous," a generous, slightly old-fashioned adjective, and there is no exclamation mark, so the wonder stays quiet and private. The small word "just" is the hinge of the whole poem. It shrinks the occasion to the bare minimum, yet it also makes that minimum enormous. The final word, "breathe," is soft and long-voweled, and saying it aloud makes you exhale. Against the clacking of the first stanza, it feels like release.
What makes the poem worth reading is its attention. We take breathing for granted until we can't do it comfortably, and illness gives the speaker a kind of fresh vision. The poem's compression and single moment of perception may remind readers of haiku, though it works in its own relaxed, speech-like way. It also balances humour with gratitude. It begins by mocking the trees and ends by thanking the air, and it never raises its voice. The poem suggests that wonder needs no grand scenery, only a hillside, a gust of wind and a clear head.