A hawk is chased, lands, and vanishes. That is the whole event of Dave Bonta's "Camouflage," and the poem still manages to turn it into something unsettling. A bird of prey, which we expect to be the hunter, begins the poem as the hunted: "Harried by crows." The word is well chosen, since "harried" suggests a nagging, exhausting persecution rather than a single blow. By the end the hawk has found shelter in a place that is itself damaged, and the poem's central idea seems to be that the safest hiding place is among the wounded, and that to hide you may have to become wound-like yourself.
The poem is one long sentence stretched over three tercets, and the grammar does some of the hiding. For two stanzas the hawk is the subject, moving through a series of plain verbs: it "glides," then "lands." The movement is smooth, even graceful, and gives no hint of panic. Then, in the final stanza, the sentence renames the bird: "one more pale wound." There is no "like" or "as" here. The metaphor arrives without announcement, and the hawk is simply absorbed into the landscape, much as it is in the tree. The phrase "one more" matters too. It implies the wounds are already being counted, and the hawk joins the tally.
The key word that makes this possible is "pale," which appears twice. First it qualifies the hawk, "the pale red-tailed hawk," and it is slightly odd there, because it cools down the vivid "red" beside it. Seven lines later it returns for the wound. That repetition is the camouflage working at the level of vocabulary: the same adjective links bird and broken wood, so that when the hawk lands, the reader's eye (and ear) can no longer separate them. The title never appears in the poem itself, and we understand it only when the last stanza completes the trick.
The imagery of the trees is harsh. The "black locusts" are "broken / by last December's ice," and the line break after "broken" leaves the word hanging for a moment before the cause is given. The trunks end in "ragged spears / of raw wood." Spears suggest weapons, so the place the hawk chooses for safety is bristling and hostile. "Raw" carries the sense of unprotected flesh as well as unfinished timber. The detail of "last December's ice" also gives the scene a past. Judging by the phrase, the damage is some months old, yet the wood is still raw, and the injury has not healed over. The poem is quiet about what this means, but it lets the reader feel that wounds can outlast the event that caused them.
There is no rhyme, and the poem relies on rhythm and sound instead. The lines are short, running from three to six syllables, and the shortest comes last: "of raw wood." Two heavy, stressed syllables land like the hawk itself, and the poem stops with it. Sound echoes quietly across stanzas. "Hawk" in the first stanza and "raw" in the last share a vowel, so the bird's name seems to sink into the wood's description. The hard consonants of "black locusts broken" and the repeated r in "ragged," "raw" and earlier "red" and "ridge" roughen the texture as the poem moves from the long, sliding sounds of "glides along the ridge" to the splintered ones of the last lines. The flight is smooth and the destination jagged.
What makes the poem significant is how much it gets from so little. In nine short lines it reverses our expectations of predator and prey, and it suggests that concealment can be a kind of vulnerability. The hawk survives by resembling harm. The crows, mentioned once and then dropped, are left outside the poem as the bird disappears from view and from the sentence's attention. Whether the hawk is safe, or only unseen, the poem does not say, and that open question is what lingers after the final, abrupt "wood."