Anyone who knows Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" will hear the first line of Dave Bonta's haiku before they have finished reading it. "Whose woods these are" is lifted straight from Frost's opening, where a traveller pauses by a forest he believes belongs to someone else. The title, "Allusive haiku," admits the borrowing openly. What the poem does with the borrowed words is the interesting part. In three short lines it keeps Frost's question and changes who is asking.
In Frost, the question is about property, and it makes the speaker slightly nervous. The owner lives in the village and "will not see me stopping here," so the speaker is half trespasser, half thief of a view. Later, the horse shakes its harness bells "to ask if there is some mistake." In Frost's poem, then, the creature who asks is the horse, a domestic animal bound to human errands. Bonta swaps the horse for a barred owl, a wild bird that answers to no one's harness. The speaker no longer feels watched or judged by a landowner or by a puzzled horse.
The line breaks do much of the work. After two lines we read "whose woods these are / a barred owl asks," and the sentence seems complete. The owl appears to be putting Frost's question to us. Then the last line turns the sentence over: the owl "asks / nothing of me." The word "asks" now hangs between two readings. The owl may be voicing the question, and it may also be declining to demand anything at all. There is no punctuation to settle it, and the poem is built to hold both meanings at once.
The sound of the poem supports the pun. A barred owl's call is often described as sounding like a question, and "who" is the syllable people most easily hear in it. Bonta's "whose" starts as a quotation from Frost and then becomes the owl's own voice. The repeated "w" of "whose woods" and the rounded "oo" vowel of "whose" and "woods" feel like a hoot carried through the line. The next words, "barred owl," are heavier and more clipped. The poem moves from echo to the bird itself, and then to the plain, almost flat "nothing of me."
The form is as pared back as the content. Each line has four syllables, so the poem does not follow the 5-7-5 count that many people associate with haiku. It has no rhyme and no capital letters, and the only punctuation is the space between lines. That suits a poem about a lack of demands. Frost's stanza is tightly rhymed and ends on duty: "promises to keep" and "miles to go." Bonta's three lines have no such obligation and simply stop. The word "nothing" is the last heavy thing we meet, and it leaves the silence of the woods after it.
The image itself is almost bare: one bird, one speaker, a stand of trees. We are not told the season, the time of day, or whether the speaker is walking or standing still. The poem gives us only the owl's indifference. The "of me" in the last line matters because it puts the speaker in the scene. The speaker is a person used to being asked things, such as who they are, what they own and what they owe. In the woods, none of that applies. The phrase can sound like relief, or it can sound a little humbling, since the owl doesn't need the speaker to be anyone in particular. The poem doesn't choose between these feelings, and I think the result is stronger for it.
What makes the poem significant, then, is how much it gets out of a borrowed line. It takes one of the best-known openings in American poetry and quietly moves the question of ownership out of the human world. Frost's woods have an owner who lives somewhere else, but in Bonta's the only inhabitant is an owl that has no use for the question. The haiku does not argue against Frost. It listens to his poem and imagines the woods answering back in the one way they could: by not answering at all.