A hundred years is a long time to want the same thing. Dave Bonta's "Reach" starts from that kind of patience: three witch hazel trunks, all stretching toward "the same, small portion / of filtered sunlight," a scrap of brightness that has made it through the canopy above. The central idea is quietly surprising. We expect crowded plants to compete and push each other apart, but these trunks "have begun to merge." A shared need, held long enough, turns into a shared body. Then the poem cuts to a person at home measuring their own arm span, and asks us to feel the two kinds of reaching side by side.
The construction is spare. There are three tercets, no rhyme and no regular meter, so the poem is free verse that relies on syntax and line breaks for its shape. The first two stanzas form a single sentence, and the grammar itself seems to reach. The opening clause, "After a hundred years of reaching," hangs in the air like a branch, and we have to cross the stanza break before we learn what the trunks have actually done. The verb, "have begun to merge," arrives only on the far side of the gap, and it is a modest one: *begun*, not finished. The poem keeps its sense of slow time by refusing to hurry its own sentence.
The word choice rewards close reading. "Portion" is an odd word for sunlight. It suggests a ration, something measured out at a table, so the light becomes food and the trees' long effort starts to sound like hunger. "Filtered" and "small" make the supply seem thin, while the comma in "same, small" slows the line and makes the repetition feel stubborn. In the second stanza the sounds change. "These three witch hazel trunks" packs its stresses closely together, and the heavy syllables of "witch" and "trunks" give the line the weight of the wood it names. The name "witch hazel" also adds a faint strangeness, as if something slightly uncanny were going on in the woods. Then comes "bulges," a surprisingly bodily verb. The ground swells like skin over something growing underneath, which suggests the merging is a pressure felt in the earth, not just a visual effect. "Common roots" works on two levels, meaning both shared and ordinary, so the merging reads as the natural result of living in the same place.
The third stanza makes the poem's boldest move. "Back home" is a hard cut with no explanation, and the poem trusts us to follow. The speaker also becomes "you," which draws the reader's own body into the scene. The verbs link the two worlds. The trunks spend a century "reaching," and now "you stretch" a tape, and the arms are "outstretched." The middle line, "a measuring tape from hand to hand," is the longest in the poem, so the line itself spans its subject. There is something both funny and touching in the image. A person tries to put a number on their reach, while the trees' reach has been recorded only in a century of growth and a swollen patch of ground. Judging by the imagery, the outstretched arms may also echo branches, so that the human figure briefly looks like one of the trunks, pulled toward whatever light it can find.
The title holds the whole poem in a single word. "Reach" is a verb for the trees, and in the final stanza it becomes a noun, a measurable distance. The poem sits between those two meanings without choosing one.
What makes "Reach" significant is how much it does without saying it. It states no moral, and it ends on "arms" instead of a concluding thought. Instead of telling us that humans belong to the natural world, it places two images next to each other and lets the echo between them work. It also gives us two scales of time, a century in the woods and a moment with a tape measure, and lets the smaller moment feel changed by the larger. A reader may leave wondering what they have been reaching toward, and whether they are alone in doing it.