"Makeshift" usually describes something thrown together from whatever is at hand: a bandage, a shelter, a stopgap. It is an odd title for a poem about spring, a season we tend to picture as lavish and sure of itself. Dave Bonta's nine lines suggest something else, a spring that has started before all its equipment has arrived. The daffodils are out, the trees are not, and the whole scene is improvised. Nothing in the poem says outright what is makeshift, so the reader has to decide. The most convincing answer is the season itself, in its awkward early stage.
The opening question is a playful one: "What would the wind do / without the daffodils' yellow / hoopla of blooms?" The wind becomes a restless creature that needs something to push around, and the daffodils become its entertainment. "Hoopla" is the key word here. It belongs to carnivals and sideshows, and it makes the flowers loud, a little gaudy and cheerfully pointless. The sound helps. The long "oo" of "hoopla" and "blooms" gives the stanza a rounded, bouncy feel, and the line is short enough to land like a clap. Read this way, the daffodils are a stand-in act, performing while the main show is not yet ready.
The main show is waiting in the second stanza, and the tone changes. "Tree leaves are still / packed tight as gunpowder / in their slim cartridges." The line break at "still" lets the word mean motionless for a moment, before the next line corrects it to *not yet*. Then the imagery turns military. The buds become cartridges and the unfurled leaves become powder, so spring is a charge waiting for a spark. The consonants add to the effect. "Packed tight," "gunpowder," and "cartridges" are full of hard p, t, k and g sounds, and they sound clipped and compressed, like the thing they describe. The comparison is both apt and unsettling. Buds really are slim, tightly wound and about to burst, yet the poem borrows the vocabulary of weapons to describe the gentlest kind of growth. The suggestion is that spring's greenness is a kind of controlled violence, and the poem lets that idea sit without comment.
The final stanza brings in a threat. "When the wind brings / the rumor of a storm, / only the rhododendron turns pale." The wind has changed from a player in the first stanza into a messenger, and "rumor" makes it a gossip, passing on news it cannot confirm. Nothing has happened yet, only word of it. The reaction is also oddly selective. The daffodils carry on with their hoopla, the buds stay locked in their cartridges, and only the rhododendron blanches like a frightened face. Judging by the imagery, the shrub seems to have the most exposed, visible surface to react with, but the poem leaves its reasons unstated. What matters is that one plant is alert while the others are oblivious or stubbornly cheerful.
The rhythm supports this movement. There is no rhyme, and the lines are short and uneven, closer to spoken remarks than to measured verse. The stanzas get progressively heavier at the end. The first closes on a quick four-syllable phrase, the second on the slightly longer "in their slim cartridges," and the third on a stretched line that runs through the sprawling word "rhododendron" and stops abruptly on the flat, single syllable "pale." The last word looks like the color draining out of the poem. It is a quiet answer to the bright yellow of the opening.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It moves from festival to ammunition to anxiety without ever raising its voice, and it never names the feeling beneath all three, which is the uncertainty of a season that is only half arrived. The flowers are out, the leaves are waiting, and a storm may or may not come. A makeshift spring, the poem implies, is one where everything is provisional, and a small gust of rumor is enough to show who is paying attention.