Dave Bonta's "Spring Evening" is a haibun, a form that pairs plain prose with short haiku, and it opens with a remark that sounds almost like a news item. In the rural U.S., power cuts are part of life, so the surprise of the pandemic is that the lights have stayed on. It is an oddly sideways way to describe a crisis: through something that has not failed. The poem's central idea grows from that. In a time of distance, people stay connected in quiet ways, through light, smell and sound, and the human world glows alongside the natural one.
The prose paragraph works like a slow scan of the horizon. The speaker stands on a ridgetop, and the eye travels from the far to the near: a "very bright" Venus, "a sliver of moon," the "black bulk of the Allegheny Front," and finally "the usual display of interstate exit lights, street lights and house lights." The order matters. The sky comes first and the highway signs come last, so the human lights read as the final, humblest items in a long list of things that shine. The language shifts with the scenery, too. "Sliver" is thin and delicate, while "black bulk" is heavy, with two blunt, solid sounds. The word "usual" slips in a small point. These lights are so ordinary that we only notice them when someone suggests they might go out.
The turn comes with a guess. In a town of 5000, "however Appalachian," there must be a few Muslim families breaking their Ramadan fast. The speaker can't see them, so "must be" is the language of reasoning and imagination, not observation. "However Appalachian" is wry and a little corrective, as if the speaker is nudging both himself and the reader past an assumed picture of what such a place contains. The haiku that follows gives no explanation:
spring evening
scent
of a backyard grill
The poem never says whose grill it is. But placing it directly after the sentence about Ramadan invites us to wonder, and that is an inference, not a stated fact. The single word "scent" gets a whole line, a pause in which the reader breathes in. A smell crosses fences and ridges in a way people, during a pandemic, cannot.
The two kinds of writing sound very different. The prose is level and informative, with long sentences and a reporter's calm ("8:30 and already most traffic has stopped"). The haiku have no rhyme, no punctuation and far fewer syllables than the traditional 5-7-5 pattern, so they seem to hang in the air. The prose supplies context, and the haiku supply the moment itself, unexplained. Between them, the sensory order is deliberate. Sight comes first, then smell, then hearing: the "first whip-poor-will," a bird whose name copies its call, so that the word itself is a sound. "First" also marks a season turning, a reminder that spring continues whatever else is happening.
The second haiku brings the poem back to light:
night forest
a glowworm's
slow blink
After the steady glare of exit signs and street lamps, here is a light that switches on and off, which the electric grid, by the poem's own account, has not done. The word "slow" matches the hush of the evening, and "blink" makes the glowworm seem almost like a small signal sent across the dark, an answer to Venus from the opposite end of the scale. The ridge now holds the whole range of light, from a planet to a highway sign to an insect.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It never mentions fear, illness or loss. The pandemic appears only as a frame, and the poem's real attention goes to what continues: electricity, dinner, birds, glowing creatures. Its generosity also stands out. The speaker does not claim to know his neighbors' lives, only that they are probably there, behind their lit windows, sharing the same evening. In a few short lines, the poem suggests that noticing carefully can be a way of staying close to other people.