Four tiny poems, and not one of them says that picking blueberries is pleasant. Dave Bonta leaves the reader to work that out from what the picker notices: a hush among the crickets, a jingle in a pocket, a star on a berry, a fly on a lip. The title, «Blueberrying», turns a noun into an activity, and the sequence behaves accordingly. It is less a portrait of a bog than a record of attention itself, moving closer to the body as the picking goes on.
The first two haiku are ruled by sound. In "sawgrass / the crickets fall silent / when the wind blows," the cause is left open. Perhaps the wind drowns the insects out, or perhaps they really do go quiet. Either way, the line break after "silent" lets the silence arrive before the wind explains it, and the s-sounds of "sawgrass," "crickets" and "silent" hiss like the grass itself. Then comes the only human noise in the sequence: "the soft clink of car keys / in my pocket." The detail is small, but it does quiet work. Keys belong to roads and errands and leaving, so the picker carries a reminder of another life into the bog. Yet the clink is "soft," and it is tucked away in a pocket, almost apologetic. The hard k-sounds of "clink," "car" and "keys" are muffled by that one adjective.
The third haiku is the pivot, and the only one with no sound at all. "blue star / at the end of each berry" asks us to look at the tiny crown on the tip of a blueberry, which forms a rough star shape. The eye has come in so close that a berry turns into a sky. The last line, "filling the bucket," has no stated subject, so the grammar lets the stars themselves seem to pour in, as though the picker were gathering constellations. The sounds back this up. "Blueberry bog" in the previous haiku and "blue star," "berry" and "bucket" here keep repeating that heavy b, the way berries pile up in a pail. Blue is also the only colour the poem names, and it is named twice, so the whole bog seems tinted by the fruit.
The final haiku shifts from the present moment to the future and then drops back. "Picking berries / against the winter" is the most thoughtful moment in the sequence. "Against" can mean "in preparation for" and also "in opposition to," so the day's work becomes a small act of defiance toward the cold season. The crickets and the fly suggest, as an inference, that we are still in warm weather, with winter only a thought on the horizon. Then the last line punctures any solemnity: "a fly on my lip." Judging by the berries, it may have been drawn by sweetness, and the picker seems to have been eating as well as gathering. The speaker doesn't swat it away or comment, and the poem ends on a body that is sticky and ordinary, one more creature feeding in the bog.
The form is loose in a way that suits the subject. The lines don't follow a strict five-seven-five count. They tend toward a short, long, short shape instead, as when the two-syllable "blue star" leads into the longer "at the end of each berry." There is no rhyme, and the music comes from repeated consonants and from the pauses at the line breaks. Each haiku opens with a place or an action and then lets one precise detail complete it. That is the habit of attention the haiku tradition prizes, and Bonta applies it four times in a row.
What makes the sequence worth reading is how much it builds from so little. Across four brief poems we move from a wide field of sound to the speaker's own mouth, from listening to touching, and from the open landscape to a thought of winter. Nothing is explained, yet a quiet argument emerges. Gathering food is a way of belonging to a place, and the picker is neither visitor nor master of the bog. He is simply another creature in it, and the car keys in his pocket are the only thing that doesn't quite fit.