Dave Bonta's short piece admits something most gardeners prefer not to say: every garden begins with an eviction. The opening sentence makes the point in miniature: "Putting a garden in so often entails putting wildlife out." The swing between "in" and "out" is the whole poem's logic. What one creature gains, another loses. The speaker feels this loss while still wanting to dig.
The form helps. Two prose paragraphs alternate with two three-line verses, a pattern that resembles haibun, the Japanese mixing of prose and haiku. The prose carries the argument and the confession, and the verses step in with a bare image and no commentary. The split lets the poem be chatty and sharp-eyed in turn.
The first paragraph builds its case through a list: "fencing, trapping, shooting, poisoning, getting a guard dog…" The verbs escalate, the last one oddly domestic after all the violence, and the trailing ellipsis hints that the list could go on. "Adversarial relationship" is cold, almost legal language, as if the speaker were describing a feud he never wanted. Then comes "the reigning passion of my youth." The royal word "reigning" turns gardening into a kind of rule over a patch of ground, and the speaker has since turned against it.
The first haiku follows: "onion bed / pulling out / wild onions." Its "pulling out" quietly answers "putting in" and "putting out," and the repeated word "onion" does a neat trick. The cultivated bed is named after the very plant that, in its wild form, is being uprooted. The poem gives no punctuation or explanation, so the reader has to feel the small irony. "Pulling out" could also mean withdrawing, which may suggest the speaker backing away from the whole enterprise, though that is a reading rather than a certainty.
The second paragraph changes the mood. "From her bunker in London" is funny. It gives the pandemic a wry domestic shape, with the speaker "stuck in Pennsylvania" and his wife sheltering elsewhere. His reply, "Great idea, I said, already relishing the thought," is full of appetite, and "relishing" even hints at the vegetables to come. The phrase "getting my fingers in the dirt" is wonderfully tactile after the abstract talk of adversaries.
Then the "But." The speaker is "just planting fence posts," and the word "just" shows how small the act is and how quickly it does harm. The "three adorable baby bunnies" are described in deliberately sentimental language, which deflates any tough-guy pose. "Displaced" is a bureaucratic, even news-bulletin word. Judging by the context, it carries a quiet irony: a man confined by circumstance sets other creatures moving from their homes. The vole is the sharpest moment: "all fur and panic." The phrase is quick and stressed, and it gives the animal a feeling without a long description. The plowing is done by a neighbor, so the speaker's hands stay technically clean, but the poem doesn't let him off the hook.
The final haiku, "wire fence / the wind's / new whistle," is the most ambiguous passage. Fencing was the first item in the speaker's list of hostile acts, so the fence arrives already loaded with meaning. Yet the image is gentle: the wind has found a new instrument. Is it music or an alarm? A whistle can charm, or it can warn. The lines are tiny, two syllables, two, then three, nowhere near the strict 5-7-5 pattern, and they read like a short gust passing through wire. "New" is the key word. A new sound, a new boundary and a new relationship with the land have all appeared, and none can be undone.
The poem ends there, on an image rather than a verdict. We never learn whether the garden thrives or whether the speaker feels redeemed. That restraint is its strength. It doesn't scold the gardener or excuse him. It shows a decent, self-aware person discovering that even the mildest plan, a few fence posts and a plowed patch, has victims. The pandemic setting adds to this, because being stuck in one place makes the speaker look closely at what lives there.
For a student reader, the lesson is in the pairing. Plain, talky prose sets out an uncomfortable idea, and two sparse images let it land without a lecture.