Dave Bonta's "Growth" starts with a small, almost comic picture and ends by turning it on us. A mind is "poised at the tipping point," dreaming of "perpetual motion," and the poem gives that dream a body: an old-fashioned toy, a wooden bird "hinged at the hips" that bends "again & again" toward its own reflection. The reflection is its "undiminished fuel," so the bird feeds on a picture of itself and never runs down. That is the fantasy, a system that sustains itself at no cost. The title suggests, though this is an inference, that the target is the modern faith in endless expansion, and the phrase "tipping point" hints at environmental anxiety.
The middle of the poem breaks the fantasy by bringing in the real world. "Last week, I saw / the sun in the surface / of a bog: it bubbled. / It trilled like a toad." The sun is another reflection, but this one comes alive. It makes noise and turns into an animal, as if the bog has absorbed the light and given it a voice. The speaker's ordinary "I saw" is a sudden relief after the abstraction of the opening, and the two short sentences give the moment a flat, observed clarity.
Then the poem turns darker, and mercury arrives. The alchemists, who treated it as a substance of transformation, "would be pleased," because it is now "nearly everywhere." The joke is bitter, since the great transmutation has happened, but as contamination. Bonta follows the metal through bodies. Its "needle threads the eye / of mother's milk," an image that quietly reverses the biblical needle's eye, so that the poison passes easily through the most tender thing in the poem. Then it becomes "quick- / silver fin & feather, legs / of a heron." The list moves from fish to bird, so the metal is shown travelling up through living things until it is part of their shapes.
The line breaks do a lot of this work. The poem has no rhyme and no steady meter. Its short, uneven lines read as breath-sized fragments, and enjambment keeps pulling the reader forward. Twice a compound word is split across the break: "quick- / silver" and "honey- / combed." The first lets "quick" hang alone for a moment, as though the word itself were slipping away. The second is the poem's most unsettling beauty. "Let our bones be honey- / combed with light" sounds like a blessing, but bones riddled with holes are also fragile bones. The poem leaves open whether the light is grace or damage, and the double meaning is the point. Sound carries the same tension: the soft alliteration of "fin & feather" and the toad-like "bubbled" and "trilled" make poison and nature seem to belong together.
The address "Extract / of death, let us dance" is the poem's strangest moment. Death is named as a substance, something pressed out and concentrated, and the response is not protest but a dance. It could be defiance, resignation or both. The final sentence closes the circle: "Bulbous, wedded / to our rituals, / we take turns bending / at the hips." "Bulbous" gives the title its sting, because here growth means swelling rather than flourishing. "Wedded" and "rituals" make our habits sound like vows we keep without thinking. "Take turns" suggests a game or a line of worshippers, and either way we have become the toy bird, repeating a motion and calling it progress. The poem returns to its opening phrase, "bending at the hips," but now the bird is plural.
What makes the poem significant is how much it fits into so few lines without lecturing. It never says "pollution" or "consumption." It lets a wooden toy, a glittering bog and a heron's legs make the argument, and it lets the reader notice that the opening fantasy and the closing dance describe the same loop. The poem is playful and frightening at once, which is how it manages to feel honest rather than preachy.