Almost everything in Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (15)" is a noun. Only a few verbs surface: the stiltgrass *stops*, the children *dug*, the gurgle *is* still down there. The rest is a scatter of plant names, one sound, one insect. The poem reads like notes from a slow walk through a patch of woods, where looking closely is the main activity. Its quiet claim is that paying attention to a place is a way of remembering it.
It opens with "touch-me-not," a name that works as a command. That is apt, because the plant's seed pods are known for bursting at the lightest contact. The next line brings in a threat: "the invasive stiltgrass stops / just short of it." The grass advances as a green tide, and the touch-me-not holds a line it never chose to defend. The poem doesn't say whether this is luck or something stronger, and the small word "just" gives the moment its tension. The reprieve is narrow, and the speaker notices it.
The three names that follow fall into a list: "glasswort / jumpseed / enchanter's nightshade." The rhythm swells as it goes, from two syllables to two to five, so the third name seems to take a longer breath. These names are half the pleasure. "Glasswort" sounds brittle and clear, "jumpseed" suggests spring-loaded motion (a cousin, in spirit, of the touch-me-not), and "enchanter's nightshade" sounds like a spell. By setting them on separate lines with no commentary, Bonta lets the plants speak for themselves. Then a different sense takes over: "a distant rooster." Sight gives way to sound, and the landscape widens beyond the plants to include a farm somewhere out of view.
The poem's emotional turn comes in its longest sentence: "that gurgle we dug / this pit to reach as kids." Notice the pointing words, "that" and "this." They place the speaker at the pit now, hearing the water, while "dug" and "as kids" pull the scene back decades. The sound has apparently stayed put while everyone changed around it. The next line is the plainest in the poem: "it's still down there." It has no ornament, only relief and a little wonder. The title adds a quiet pun. A hollow is a small valley, but it is also an emptiness, and here the children dug a hollow of their own in search of something hidden.
The ending extends this. "Wingstem / at the old dump site" shows a plant taking over human refuse, which echoes the opening, where one plant resisted an invader. Then comes the last line, "the bumblebee's long tongue." It has no verb and no scene around it, only an instrument built for reaching down into a flower. The poem has been about reaching all along: the children digging for the gurgle, the bumblebee probing for nectar. Both are driven by a wish to touch something hidden and sweet. The poem also ends on a mouth-part, an image of taking in the world.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation to slow it down. White space does that work instead. Single lines stand alone like stepping stones, and the reader has to leap between them. This is why the poem feels like observation rather than argument. Nothing is explained, and the connections (invasion and resistance, childhood and now, waste and growth) are left for the reader to make.
The poem matters because of what it trusts. It trusts specific names over general words like "nature" or "wildflowers," and it trusts a small, odd detail to carry feeling. The number in the title suggests it belongs to a sequence, and the poem does feel like one entry in a longer habit of looking. What it leaves with the reader is the line about the pit: something we once worked hard to reach can go on existing, unseen, without us.