A walk downhill turns into something close to a meditation in Dave Bonta's «The Hollow (7)». It opens with an invitation: "the descent beckons / in three directions." The verb gives the landscape a will of its own, as if the hollow were calling the walker down. The three directions turn out to be "old charcoal haul roads," a phrase that suggests earlier human work, now abandoned and grown over. The next line, "crossroads deep in moss," finishes the picture. A crossroads usually means a decision, but moss softens everything and slows it down. The choices are real, yet the place seems to have stopped hurrying anyone.
The poem then looks up. "A ladder of fungi climbs / a nearby snag" reverses the downward pull of the opening. The metaphor is exact, since shelf fungi do stack in tiers up a trunk. A snag is a dead tree left standing, and the poem lets it host a climb, so death becomes a support for other life. The word "ladder" also hints at ascent in a poem that began with a descent, as if the hollow offered a way up as well as a way down.
The turn comes in the middle: "namaste means / I bow to the divine in you." Nothing in the forest has prepared us for it, and the plain, dictionary-like phrasing is part of the effect. The speaker offers the line almost as a gloss, a small lesson dropped into the woods. The poem never says who "you" is. It could be the oak that appears next, the reader, or the hollow itself. Because the line sits among fungi and moss, it makes the forest feel like something to greet rather than just look at.
Then comes the "lightning-struck oak," and the poem argues with a proverb. "It's not true / that lightning never strikes twice" is spoken flatly, like a correction. The saying is meant to comfort, because it promises that disaster will not repeat. The poem takes that comfort away and offers a different consolation. The last image, "spears of heartwood," shows what a strike can reveal. Heartwood is the dense inner core of a tree, and when the oak splinters, that core is thrown outward in sharp, upright shards. The word "heart" links back to "the divine in you," so the damage seems to expose what the tree holds inside. The poem doesn't state this, but placing the lines side by side invites the reader to see it. "Spears" adds menace and strength, so the wounded oak looks armed as well as broken.
The form works the same way. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the poem uses no capitals and almost no punctuation. The stanzas alternate between longer groupings and single lines, in a pattern of three, one, two, two, one, two, one. The single lines, "crossroads deep in moss," "lightning-struck oak," and "spears of heartwood," work like stepping stones. Each is an image left alone, with white space to absorb it. The poem favors short, hard sounds, such as the clipped "snag," "oak," and "moss," and the stressed run of "spears of heartwood." That suits a poem about wood and stone-quiet places. This method of setting images next to each other and trusting the reader to feel the connection resembles haiku, though that is an impression from the text and not a claim about the poet's intentions. The numeral in the title also suggests that this is one piece in a sequence of poems about the same place.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so few words. In about thirty-five words it moves from invitation to ascent, then to blessing, and finally to a refusal of false comfort. It also lets a blasted tree stand as a sign of what remains after damage. It does this without announcing a moral, leaving the reader to decide what to bring back up from the hollow.