Gossip, in Dave Bonta's eight-line poem, behaves like a weather system. It starts in a coffee house, where "talk is a great wind," and by the end it has uprooted a whole forest and sent it marching. The central idea is that talk and news don't just carry information, they inflate it, turning ordinary events into spectacle. We enjoy that spectacle, and it costs us something.
The title is a famous wartime slogan warning that careless chatter could sink ships by handing secrets to the enemy. Bonta never mentions war, and the poem doesn't seem interested in secrets. It borrows the slogan's logic, though. Wind is what fills sails and drives ships, and lips are what produce talk, so the old warning already treats speech as a force that can wreck things. Bonta carries that idea inland. His wind doesn't sink anything. It knocks down trees. The shift from sea to forest makes the saying feel both familiar and slightly off, as if it has been left out in the weather.
The opening lines are plain. "Talk is a great wind" is almost all one-syllable words, flat and sure of itself like a proverb. Then comes "Trees blow down / and we have letters from the forest," and the poem's most interesting image arrives. Read one way, the forest is sending us messages. Read another, the felled trees have become paper, and the paper has become letters, and the letters have become the news. Destruction turns into information with no pause in between, which is what the cheerful "and we have" suggests. Something solid is lost so that something to read can exist.
Then the poem lets go of realism. "A thousand oaks walk to Brampton / in the news." The number is a giveaway, because rumours love round, enormous figures, and oaks are about the slowest, most rooted things in nature. Walking trees may also recall the moving wood in Shakespeare's *Macbeth*, where a forest advancing on a castle seems impossible until it happens. That's an inference, but it fits, since the poem is about how the impossible becomes believable once enough people repeat it. "Brampton" is a modest, ordinary-sounding place name, and the poem never says more about it. The mismatch between a small town and an invading forest is where the humour sits. The short line "in the news:" works like a drumroll, and its colon promises a verdict.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no end rhyme and no regular beat, just free verse that moves in short, conversational lines. But "talk" in the second line quietly rhymes with "walk" in the fifth, and the echo links chatter to the moving forest, as if saying a thing could set it walking. Long vowels in "great wind," "blow down" and "oaks" give the middle lines a rolling, gusty weight.
The ending turns the poem sharper. "They make a good tale, thieves / that rob us of time." The line break leaves "thieves" hanging at the end of a line like an accusation. The grammar is also slippery. The thieves could be the oaks, the tales, or the talkers who pass them on. The phrase "a good tale" sounds like casual praise, a pub-style approval, and the poem then reverses it. Good stories are exactly what steal our afternoons. The coffee house, a place long associated with swapping news, becomes a place where time is quietly picked from our pockets.
The poem also implicates itself. It is a tale about tales, and it takes a reader only a few seconds to get through, so it is perhaps the politest thief of all. That self-awareness keeps it from sounding like a lecture. Bonta doesn't scold anyone for listening. He lets the image of the walking forest be so entertaining that we feel the pull ourselves.
That is why the poem matters despite its size. In eight lines it shows how exaggeration works: a gust of talk, a distortion, a headline, and then a story too good to question. It also leaves the reader to notice that the habit is a shared one, and that nobody is exempt from it.