A gardener's wrong guess opens Dave Bonta's "In the Fullness of Time." Six weeks after planting, the potatoes are finally up, and the speaker admits he had feared the worst: holes in every hill, and mice surely to blame. The real explanation is a cold spring, and "sprouts were simply taking their time." The comparison that follows is quietly clever. The newest leaves are "no bigger than the ears of the mice" he suspected, so the imagined thief shrinks into a unit of measurement. His suspicion becomes a way of seeing how small and new the leaves are. The paragraph ends on a flat, almost shrugging sentence: the neighbors "had urged patience, and they were right." Nothing is underlined, yet the poem's first lesson is already there.
The shape is that of a haibun, a form that pairs prose with haiku. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The prose is conversational, its sentences long and full of small turns ("especially after," "But it's been"), as if the speaker were thinking aloud while looking at the beds. The two short verses at the end are far more compressed, and their line breaks do real work. The contrast in pace matters, because the poem is about the difference between time that drags and time that ripens.
The second paragraph widens the frame. "All this waiting to see what happens with the pandemic" is the only mention of the larger crisis, and it stays deliberately vague. The poem never describes fear or illness. It names the strain of waiting and then offers the garden as an answer. The key distinction is between waiting and having "something to wait for." Time without a goal is "some lifeless assembly line," a row of identical units that merely pass. The garden's time gets four active verbs, and each one reaches further than the last: it "unfolds, ramifies, flourishes, bears fruit." "Ramifies" is a slightly unexpected, almost scientific word for branching, and it fits a plant spreading in every direction. Against this, the title's idiom takes on extra weight. "In the fullness of time" usually just means "eventually," but here fullness is literal. It is leaf, tuber and harvest.
The first haiku turns the lens on the speaker: "even as / I pull weeds my beard / keeps on growing." The break after "as" makes the reader wait, and the second break lands on "beard," a gently comic surprise. His own body is another crop, growing without his effort while he removes what he doesn't want. The image also admits that the same slow time works on the gardener. Judging by the tone, the beard may hint at a person left to his own devices at home, though the poem never says so.
The second haiku is the most mysterious: "evening garden / a snake has left her skin / beside the lettuce." We never see the snake, only what she has shed. A discarded skin is growth made visible, since becoming something new means leaving something behind. The setting is also faintly unsettling, a snake in a garden. Yet "her" makes the animal a presence rather than a threat, and the lettuce keeps the scene domestic. A reader might also remember the mice and wonder whether this visitor is bad news for them. That is an inference, not something the poem states.
The poem is significant because it responds to uncertainty without pretending to solve it. It gives no advice about the pandemic. It shows one person learning from a small error that things can be slow without being lost, and that attention to slow things makes waiting bearable. The ending offers no moral. It offers a beard and a snakeskin, two quiet signs that change is happening whether or not anyone is watching.