A prospector goes out looking for gold or silver, something that can be sold. The one in Dave Bonta's five-line poem comes back with something far less marketable: "cries." He doesn't find them in a riverbed or a rock face but "in a lung." In a handful of words the body becomes a mine, and the speaker becomes a worker who goes down into it and keeps at it through the dark.
The most intriguing phrase is "where they were words." We usually imagine cries coming before language, as a baby's do. Here the order is reversed: words came first and have been reduced to raw sound. The line can be read two ways. The cries may be what words turn into when they fail, or they may simply occupy the place where words used to be. Either way something has been lost. The colon after "words" works like a small drumroll, and the answer, "in a lung," arrives flat and blunt. A lung is where breath is stored and where speech starts, so a cry is breath forced out under pressure. The poem never says whose cries these are or what caused them, and that silence makes them feel heavier.
The second half moves from finding to handling. "I give the remains to a book" is the poem's richest line, mostly because of "remains." In mining language, remains are what is left once the valuable material has been taken. Remains are also what is left of a person who has died. The poem doesn't say which it means, but the second sense turns the book into something like a grave or a place of offering, and the speaker into someone performing a last duty. The verb matters too. The speaker doesn't say "I write" or "I record." He says "I give," which suggests handing something over rather than inventing it. He is a finder and a courier, not the owner of what he finds. The title says the same thing: a prospector discovers what is already in the ground.
The ending is only three words: "work all night." Grammatically it is oddly bare, because the "I" has dropped away. It could continue the speaker's list of actions, or it could be an order he gives himself. Night suggests a miner's shift, a writer's insomnia, or both. The sounds quietly link these ideas. "Where they were words" is thick with w's, and "work" repeats that sound, as if words and work were the same substance. The long *i* of "I find cries" returns in "night," so the poem is bracketed by the same vowel, which gives such a short piece a sense of closure.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The shape of the lines does the work instead. Counted by syllables, they run three, four, three, seven, three. The short lines land like pick strokes, each one a single hard effort. Only the fourth line stretches out, and it is the line about giving the remains away, as if that act took the longest and demanded the most care. Then the poem snaps back to its short, hard rhythm and ends without comment or consolation.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds for how little it says. It treats writing as salvage and labor rather than as polished self-expression. What gets saved is a cry, the kind of sound we usually dismiss as noise, and the book becomes a place for what ordinary language couldn't carry. The poem also does what it describes. It is itself a small remains handed to a page, with the ore refined down to almost nothing. It leaves out the story behind the cries, and a reader is invited to fill that gap from their own experience of loss or exhaustion. The poem suggests that the work of making something from pain is quiet, repetitive and done mostly out of sight.