Mud, dirt and a pair of grubby hands: Dave Bonta's "Walking onions" builds its whole idea out of earth. Three short stanzas show three kinds of planting. Birds build a nest, a person sets out onions, and the onions, left alone, do the job themselves. Without ever saying so, the poem suggests that human effort is one small part of a much larger cycle that carries on whether or not we are there to supervise it.
The first stanza keeps its distance. The phoebes are "across the road," so the speaker is watching, not taking part. The word "beakfuls" is the first small pleasure. It borrows the shape of "handfuls" and "armfuls" and applies it to a bird, so the birds' labour is measured as if it were human work. Its mud goes "into their nest," and the preposition matters, because mud becomes shelter. In the second stanza the camera swings from the road to the speaker's own hands. The strange word there is "harvest." The speaker is planting, yet what the fingernails gather is "black crescents" of soil. The verb is a quiet joke, and also a real observation. Gardening pays you back immediately, in the dirt you cannot wash out. Crescents also give the fingernails the shape of tiny moons, which lifts a messy detail into something almost beautiful. The rhyme between the two stanzas is one of image: the birds carry mud in their beaks, and the person carries it under the nails.
The third stanza turns on a change of tense and a piece of gardening knowledge. Walking onions are a variety that grows small bulbs at the top of the stem. The stem bends under their weight, and the bulbs root wherever they land, so the plant slowly "walks" across the bed. The poem trusts the reader to find this out, or to sense it from the title. The speaker, meanwhile, is leaving ("while I'm gone"), and the poem does not say where to or why. The onions' movement answers the speaker's departure, and the reader may notice that both are walking away. But the onions' version is a form of staying, since they "re-plant themselves" in the same ground. The hyphen in "re-plant" slows the word down and stresses the repetition. What the speaker did by hand is done again with no hands at all, and the final image, "head-down in the dirt," has a faint comedy to it, like a plant doing a headstand or diving headlong into the work.
The poem's form is as spare as its subject. It has three tercets, no rhyme and no regular metre, and the lines are short and close to speech. The grammar does a lot of the work. "Thumb- and fingernails" uses a suspended hyphen, a compact little construction that saves a word and fits the cramped, practical feel of the whole piece. Stanza three has the longest line, "the walking onions will re-plant themselves," which stretches out as the plants spread. It is followed by a short, heavy, almost entirely one-syllable close, "head-down in the dirt," which lands with a thud. "Dirt" there echoes "mud" from the first stanza, so the poem begins and ends in the same material. The tenses also move in a pattern: the first two stanzas are in the present, and the last looks ahead. The poem begins with other creatures, moves to the speaker, and ends with the speaker's absence.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it insists. It offers no lesson about nature and no declaration of humility, only three observations placed side by side. The reader supplies the connection: the speaker's work is real but temporary, and the garden has its own energy. There is something affectionate in that, and something freeing. The gardener is allowed to leave, and the poem treats this as a comfort and not a loss.