Most letters ask for something. This one only says thank you, and that is where its unease begins. Dave Bonta's "Leaf Letter [screenplay]" opens with the plainest of salutations, "Dear / ground," and spends seventeen short lines thanking the earth for holding us up, for letting us sleep, and finally for letting us "all fall / down." What starts as a polite, almost childlike note ends as something closer to a farewell.
The poem's shape is the first thing to notice. The lines swell from single words ("Dear," "ground,") to the longest line at the centre, "I go on falling until I wake," and then taper back to the lone word "down." The outline suggests a leaf, wide in the middle and pointed at both ends, which fits the title. It also acts out a fall: the words drift down the page and land on the last line, the way a leaf lands. Because there is no regular rhythm or rhyme, the line breaks do the work a metre would. The speaker seems to be catching their breath, hesitating, then starting again. Most of the lines are broken against the grammar. "Thank you for / always being there / for us" makes the gratitude arrive in small, careful pieces, as if the speaker is choosing each word.
The word "fall" carries a lot. It is the season in which leaves drop, the act of dropping, and, for a dreamer, the fear of going on "falling until I wake." The poem's central turn comes in that dream. The ground is thanked because it is reliable, and the speaker admits how much we depend on that: in sleep, its absence is a nightmare. The longest line is the one about falling without end, so the poem gives most room to the thing it fears most. Whether the speaker is a leaf, a person, or both is left open. Judging by "letting us sleep" and "we have been burning," the voice slides from the leaf of the title toward a human "we," and the poem profits from the blur.
The second half darkens the thanks. "Your enormous / reserves of darkness" is a strange phrase, because "reserves" sounds like the language of oil and coal, and "burning" suggests that these buried stores have been used up for fuel and light. The imagery points toward fossil fuels, though the poem never names them. The logic is a neat trap: we burn the earth's darkness "to / keep the darkness at / bay." The line break before "bay" holds the word back for a moment, so that "at" seems to hang over an edge. The thing we are fighting and the thing we are burning are the same, so the fight can't be won. The phrase "ashes to ashes" then closes the thought with the funeral service's language of burial and return, turning the burning into a quiet picture of mortality.
That is why the ending lands as it does. "Thank you for / letting us / all fall / down" echoes the nursery rhyme "Ring a Ring o' Roses," with its "ashes, ashes, we all fall down." The echo brings a playground chant into a poem about endings, and the effect is both gentle and chilling. A child's game becomes a statement about death, and the repeated "thank you" becomes harder to read. It could be sincere, or resigned, or tinged with irony, and the poem doesn't choose. The ground that stops our falling is also where we end up, and it is both comfort and grave.
The poem is significant because of how much it holds in so little space. It is a small ecological lament that never lectures. Its only tool is politeness, and the repeated "thank you" gradually exposes what we owe and what we have taken. It also shows how a poem's shape can be part of its meaning. We read about a fall while our eyes travel down a narrowing column of words, and we reach the ground at the same moment the speaker does.