In fewer than fifteen words, Dave Bonta stages a small disagreement. Someone says the coyotes sound as if they are fighting. The poem sets two words against that idea, "barbaric yawp," and the clash between the two ways of hearing is what the poem is about.
"Barbaric yawp" is Walt Whitman's phrase. In "Song of Myself" he declares, "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." In Whitman it is a boast, a rough and unpolished shout of being alive, made by a speaker who insists he is "not a bit tamed." Bonta's poem borrows that joyful, defiant meaning and lays it over an animal noise. Even the verb carries across: Whitman *sounds* his yawp, and Bonta's coyotes *sound*. What was a deliberate act of self-assertion becomes a plain description of what the animals do. The central idea follows from this. The same wild noise can be heard as violence or as exultation, and the choice says as much about the listener as about the animal.
The order of the lines supports this. The poem opens with the yawp before we know who is crying out, so the phrase arrives like a caption, or a thought that drops into the head. Only then does "you say" appear. Those two words work as a hinge, because they hold the fighting reading at arm's length. It is reported, not owned. The poem never says who is right, and it leaves open whether "barbaric yawp" is the speaker's reply or simply the sound being described. That ambiguity is part of the design. The simile also hedges: the coyotes sound "as if they're fighting," and that leaves room for them not to be fighting at all.
The word "barbaric" adds another layer. It comes from the Greek *barbaros*, which is usually explained as an imitation of foreign speech that sounded like babble to Greek ears, a "bar-bar" noise. The word began as a judgment made by a listener who didn't understand. That fits the poem well, since "you" hears fighting in a language neither of them speaks.
The sound of the language does quiet work too. "Yawp" opens the mouth wide on its vowel and shuts it with a popped *p*, so the word acts out the cry it names. The middle line is full of soft *s* sounds ("say," "sound"), which makes the human speech sound smooth and reasonable. The last line ends on the harder "fighting," with its sharp *f* and *t*. There is no rhyme, no capital letter and no final punctuation. The poem stops on "fighting" without a full stop, and the sound seems to trail off into the dark.
The rhythm is irregular but compact. The lines run to roughly four, seven and five syllables, depending on how you say "coyotes." That echoes the brevity of haiku without following the strict 5-7-5 pattern. The middle line, the longest, ends on a quiet enjambment. "You say the coyotes sound" could almost be a complete thought, simply that the coyotes make a noise. Then the next line arrives with its interpretation, and the reader feels the moment where plain sound turns into human opinion.
The imagery is entirely auditory. There is no moon, no hillside and no darkness described, so readers supply the scene themselves, as we do when we hear something we cannot see. The title, three asterisks, adds to this. Instead of a name, the poem gets a section break, which makes it feel like a fragment lifted out of a longer silence or conversation. The "you" is never explained, and that gives the lines the closeness of overheard talk between two people.
The poem is slight, but it is significant because it asks a large question in a small space: what do we do when we meet a voice we cannot translate? The easy move is to turn it into something familiar, such as a fight. By reaching for Whitman, the poem suggests a more generous reading, in which the cry is not a threat but a wild voice announcing that it exists. It leaves the reader listening more carefully for the difference.