Dave Bonta's "Quarantine Walk" is a haibun: a block of plain prose sandwiched between two tiny haiku-like verses. On the surface it records a walk and a change in what can be heard. Its central idea is that silence is a kind of space. When the noise drops away, the place a person lives in feels bigger, and paying attention becomes the reward.
The opening verse is barely a sentence. It has no punctuation, no capitals and no rhyme, and it runs to about four, five and three syllables, much shorter than the textbook 5-7-5. Its grammar is pleasingly loose. "Stopping at the sound / of a jet" does not say who stops, so the participle seems to halt the whole walk. In ordinary life a jet is background noise nobody registers. Here it is an event strong enough to freeze someone mid-step. The rare sound makes the surrounding quiet audible. The word "stopping" also feeds the prose, where the speaker "can't stop marveling." The stillness of the walk becomes the stillness of the mind.
The prose paragraph turns the idea into a small paradox. The speaker usually finds the "close horizons of this narrow hollow" a little "claustrophobic." A hollow is a small valley, and the poem treats it like a bowl that collects and bounces sound. Then comes the list of culprits: "adjacent highways, the nearby quarry, and factories and businesses in town." The wording is flat and almost municipal, the way constant noise is dull as well as loud. When it is gone, the sentence relaxes into "it feels more spacious." The landscape hasn't changed at all, but the ear has redrawn its edges.
The prose also moves the poem from the machine sky to the animal sky. The jet of the first verse is matched by "a pair of local Canada geese" flying over at dusk. "Local" is a nice touch, since it treats the geese as neighbours rather than scenery. Their sound is now audible, and the speaker responds by holding his breath. Hearing them requires him to make himself quiet too, so the listener becomes part of the silence he is describing. The paragraph ends on a dry joke: he "no longer envy animals that live underground their superior soundproofing." The sentence is wry, and its soft, hushing s sounds ("superior soundproofing") do a little of the work of quiet themselves. It also admits that the old noise was a burden. He used to want to burrow away from it, and now the surface will do.
That joke sets up the last verse, which moves from sky to ground: "last week's rain / that hush / in the moss." Moss is the real soundproofing, a living version of the burrow he no longer needs to envy. The verse has no verb, so the hush simply sits there like the moss. "Last week's rain" adds a gentle time-lag. The rain is gone, but its effect lingers, soaked into the ground, much as the quiet lingers after the traffic has stopped. "That hush" points at something almost within reach, and the word itself is onomatopoeic, because saying it makes the sound it names. The poem ends on a sound that is really the absorption of sound.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. The words "quarantine" and "lockdown" place it in the pandemic, but it never mentions illness, fear or loss. It looks at one odd side effect of a strange time and treats it with curiosity and humour instead of solemnity. The three-part shape (verse, prose, verse) mirrors the movement of attention, from a startling noise, to reflection, to a small, close-up silence. The poem suggests that listening hard enough can make a cramped place feel wide.