Spring arrives in Dave Bonta's "Migrants" without announcement. Nothing is declared or explained. A bird returns, another bird goes about its work, and a person falls asleep within earshot. Yet the title makes a claim the three small scenes seem to be testing: that migration is less a spectacle than a way of arriving and being heard, and that the one who stays put can belong to it by listening.
The poem is built from three unrhymed tercets, each a single sentence-like unit with its own image. It has no regular meter, and the lines run short, close to speech. The brevity and the seasonal marker, "is back," recall haiku, though the poem doesn't follow any syllable count. The first stanza opens with a return and then, after the dash, lets the song unfold: "that rising trill spilling / from a small, pink beak." The verb "spilling" matters. Song is treated as liquid, something that overflows its container, and the word seems to plant an idea that the third stanza picks up when the creek appears. The line break after "spilling" also makes the sound pour over into the next line, so the reader feels the spill as well as reading it. "Small, pink beak" then pulls the camera in tight. A big, bright sound comes from a tiny, delicate source.
The second stanza turns from sound to labour. The "yellow-bellied sapsucker" has the longest and most clumsily comic name in the poem, and the line is correspondingly long. It plods, then the verb "taps" lands briskly. The bird "taps a ring of wells all around / the bole of a hickory," and the line break after "all around" makes the sentence circle the tree as the bird does. The word "wells" is a quiet metaphor. The holes become little water sources, which links back to "spilling" and ahead to "creek." Even the hard-sounding "bole," with its round vowel, keeps the poem's attention on the trunk as something to be encircled, tapped and drawn from. The tree becomes a place of hospitality as well as a perch, a stopover where a traveller feeds.
Then the poem does something unexpected. It addresses "you." Until now we have watched birds. Now a human appears, but one who does almost nothing: "You nap on the porch." The second person is intimate and slightly teasing, as if the speaker were observing a companion or talking to himself. The napper is not shut off from the world. Their "ears open to the creek and other / migrant tongues." The key word is "other." It folds the creek into the same category as the sparrow and the sapsucker, so water becomes a migrant too, always arriving from somewhere and passing on. "Tongues" turns song, tapping and flowing water into languages. It also faintly suggests human migrants and the many speech patterns people carry with them, though that is an inference the poem leaves open rather than insists on.
There is a nice puzzle in the order of things. The first two stanzas give us details, a pink beak and a yellow belly, that a sleeper could not see. Perhaps the napper saw them before dozing off, or perhaps the details are imagined from the sounds. Either way, the poem suggests that listening can fill in the picture. The ear stays awake while the eye rests.
What makes "Migrants" worth reading is how much it trusts attention. It has no moral and no grand statement about nature. The poem ends on an open ear rather than a conclusion, and the last line's "other" and "tongues" do more work than any explanation could. The person on the porch is not a migrant in the literal sense, but by the end they are part of the same traffic of voices, the one who receives what passes through. For a reader, the lesson is practical as well as poetic: some of the best ways of belonging to a place involve staying still and paying attention.