Dave Bonta begins with something almost comically small: a new button on a social media site. The "care" emoji shows a yellow, featureless figure hugging a heart, and the speaker's first joke is a twist on the old saying that absence makes the heart grow fonder. Here the heart is literally "disembodied," a fitting image for affection that arrives through a screen. Then comes the sharper turn. "To older eyes, unless you squint," the figure seems to be "clutching an open wound." The same picture can be comfort or injury, depending on who looks and how closely. That ambiguity drives the whole piece, and the title, "How to Care," reads as a real question rather than a lesson.
The poem is built like a haibun, with blocks of plain prose alternating with short haiku-like verses. The prose is conversational and dry, almost a diary entry. The verses are bare fragments with no punctuation and no rhyme. They do not follow a strict five-seven-five count either. "Soil / too wet to plant / fresh graves" shrinks to one syllable, then four, then two. The prose explains, and the verse looks. Each verse arrives like a pause after a sentence the speaker cannot finish.
The first verse is a small, odd scene: "taking shelter / under my umbrella / mosquito." The word order matters. Until the last line we might expect the speaker to be the one sheltering, and the mosquito appears only at the end as an uninvited guest. The phrase "taking shelter" also carries the sound of lockdown language, with everyone indoors and everyone wary. A mosquito, a creature that lives off other bodies, has crept into the one dry space the speaker has made. Judging by the imagery, the line quietly tests what care costs: to shelter anything is to let it close. It also echoes the "open wound" of the opening paragraph.
The second prose block moves from the weather ("Such a long, cold, rainy April") to the death toll, which "continues to climb, just as the scientists foretold." The verb "climb" makes the numbers sound like a hill ascended step by step, while the flat phrase "just as the scientists foretold" holds a weary reproach. Then the speaker catches a flaw in the way people talk about loss. Comparing COVID-19 deaths with the Vietnam War, he says, makes "our imperial adventures seem like natural disasters." The point is that a comparison meant to measure grief can erase blame, since a war is chosen and a storm is not.
What follows is the poem's most striking move. Having said that "it's always hard to turn the dead into mere statistics," the speaker refuses to leave the numbers abstract and offers two pictures instead. One is a stadium where "the entire crowd has just perished." The other is "all the stumps in a 300-acre forest that's just been clear-cut." The stadium gives a human scale, ordinary people in seats. The forest is more unsettling, partly because of the precise acreage and partly because clear-cutting is a human act. After he warned against calling man-made harm natural, his own image keeps the human hand in view, with stumps as the leftovers of something done.
The closing verse pulls the poem's threads together. "Soil / too wet to plant" first reads as a farmer's complaint about the rainy April, and the line break lets us settle into that reading before "fresh graves" lands. Planting and burying, two actions that both work the earth, collapse into one. The wet ground that delays the crops is the same ground that receives the dead, and the verse has no verb to soften it.
The poem matters because it answers its own title without preaching. A reaction button asks us to care in one click, but Bonta shows care as attention: to the ambiguity of a picture, to the politics buried in a comparison, to the exact size of a loss. He sets the cheap symbol beside real images (an umbrella, a stadium, a stump, a grave) and lets the difference speak. For a student reader, it is a good example of how a few plain words, placed carefully, can do more than a pictogram.