Eight short lines, four couplets, and not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's poem reads like a report filed in a hurry by someone too hot to finish his sentences. The title promises a "brief dispatch," the kind of message a correspondent sends from the field, and "Anthropocene" names the era in which human activity has become a force on the planet's climate and landscape. Yet the scene is tiny. A man sits in the shade next to a rock, and some crows are making a racket. The gap between that grand label and that modest scene is where the poem lives.
Look first at its opening, "sweating in the shade / the boulder and I." The grammar is slippery. Who is sweating, the speaker or the boulder? The phrasing lets both share the verb, so a man and a lump of ancient stone sit side by side as equals. That is an odd, slightly comic thought, but it also fits the title. In a geological age named after humans, the human is reduced to a companion of rocks, and even the shade, which should be a relief, offers only a place to sweat.
The second couplet turns to a joke: "I'd shave my head / but it only brings the sun closer." The logic is playful and a little absurd, since a bald head does not move the sun. But the joke carries a real feeling of helplessness. Every small fix the speaker imagines makes the problem feel more intimate, more exposed. Judging by the title, it is hard not to hear a wider point about individual gestures against a warming world, though the poem never says so. It lets a self-deprecating remark do the work that a lecture would spoil.
Then comes the poem's hinge. The word "closer" ends one couplet and opens the next: "closer still a mob of crows." The repetition works like a handover, as though the closeness of the sun passes straight into the closeness of the birds. The crows arrive in the speaker's ear, and "re-convenes" gives them the air of a committee returning to its session. I read that as a quiet swipe at endless meetings, though that is an inference from the word choice. "Mob" is well chosen too. Crows really do mob predators, and the word also suggests a crowd with a grievance. Because the crows are "in my ear," the noise could be outside or inside the speaker's head, a general buzz of alarm he cannot switch off.
The final couplet is the most richly written: "iridescent midnight feathers / aimed at an owl." "Iridescent" and "midnight" pull against each other, shimmering light and deep dark, so the black feathers glitter in the heat of the day. Then the language drops from that long, shining word to the blunt, mostly one-syllable "aimed at an owl." "Aimed" turns feathers into weapons, and the owl is never seen to react. The poem simply stops with the crows' attention fixed on their target. We can read the owl, traditionally a symbol of wisdom, as the thing a noisy crowd is determined to drive off. That reading is an interpretation, but the poem's refusal to resolve the scene invites it.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is conversational, with short lines of roughly four to seven syllables. Sound does the binding instead. A long "a" runs through "shade," "shave" and "aimed," and the first couplet's "sweating" and "shade" share a hush of s-sounds. The poem has the compression of a haiku without keeping that form's syllable count, and the lowercase, unpunctuated lines make it feel like overheard thought.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. Climate anxiety is usually presented in large numbers and warnings. Here it becomes heat, a bald head, a bird argument, and an unseen owl. The human presence shrinks to a single sweating "I," while the crows take over the last four lines. Humans may have named the age, but in this small dispatch the more vivid voices belong to the rock and the birds.