A Saturday in mid-July, the edge of a forest, and a question the poem takes its time answering: what blooms here? Dave Bonta's "In drought" opens with an image it doesn't trust, "a faded red that could also / be dropped leaves." The doubt is the point. In a dry summer the line between flowering and dying blurs, and a colour that should signal life might be early litter. The speaker calls such signs "the calling cards of drought," a wry personification that makes drought a visitor who leaves evidence of itself without ever appearing.
From there the poem moves like a slow walk, noting one creature after another under strain. A monarch chrysalis falls, and its "golden ellipsis" is the gold-flecked band that rings it. The word also works as punctuation. The poem has almost none: no commas, no full stops. The only dots on the page belong to the chrysalis, a sentence trailing off. The "bitter pill" that follows fits the chrysalis too, since monarchs are known to taste foul to birds. Here the pill is something a "young bird / still learning how to forage" must try to swallow, and that bird is learning in a bad year.
The middle of the poem sets abundance beside damage. "Blueberries ripen / cracks widen in the moss" has two clauses of identical shape, even sharing the -en ending, and no punctuation to say how they relate. Is it one thought or two? Ripening and cracking happen together, and the reader must hold both. The deer comes next, her pelt twitching "under an endless assault of flies." The military word "assault" sits against her slow, "methodical" stripping of a spicebush. She endures and keeps eating, and the poem gives her no more drama than that.
The last five couplets turn from endurance to energy, and the language changes with them. The hummingbird is heard before he is seen, and he arrives as machinery: a "small engine," "five-spoked / wheels of soapwort," a "minor roar," and then a verb borrowed from rocketry. The line break in "humming- / bird's" makes the reader hover for a moment at the hyphen, as if the word were being beaten by wings. These five couplets are also one long sentence. With no stops to slow it, it gathers speed down the page, just as the bird "rockets back and forth."
The form is quiet free verse in unrhymed couplets, with short lines of uneven length. Breaks fall at hesitant moments, such as "could also / be" and "as he / rockets," so the poem feels like speech picked up mid-observation, a field note rather than a performance. Sound does some of the work that rhyme would otherwise do. The *s* of "spicebush," "strips," "soapwort" and "spoked" runs through the second half like a rustle, and "small" appears twice in the space of a few lines, a spicebush and then an engine, as if to say that this whole drama is happening at a tiny scale.
The ending returns to the opening question. The beebalm's "alluring scarlet tongues" are a red that is unmistakably alive, unlike the doubtful faded red at the start. They are "ready to risk desiccation / for a more urgent thirst." The grammar leaves open whose thirst this is. It could be the bird's hunger for nectar, or the flowers' need to be visited and pollinated, and the word "tongues" lets both readings sit together. A poem about lack ends on the word "thirst," which here means desire as well as deprivation. The drought is real, but appetite and attraction go on anyway, and they drive creatures to spend what little they have.
The poem's significance lies in what it declines to do. It never states a moral about climate or scarcity. It trusts exact, named things (spicebush, soapwort, beebalm) and lets a web of small pressures build up: a falling chrysalis, a fledgling's first meals, a deer besieged by flies. By the time the hummingbird appears, the reader understands what his roar is up against, and why it feels like a small triumph.