Fifteen words are all Dave Bonta needs to fill an afternoon and a night with noise. "Crickets" is barely a sentence, with no verb beyond the "are" of its opening, yet it captures a familiar experience: the moment a background sound stops being background and has to be reckoned with.
What is striking is that the poem never describes a cricket. There is no grass, no wing, no field. The insects exist only in the title, and the poem gives us what a listener actually gets, which is the sound and the sense of time passing inside it. Its central idea seems to be that persistence can make the ordinary uncanny. Anyone who has lived with a repeated noise knows how it can turn from pleasant to tiresome to eerie without changing at all. Bonta compresses that shift into three couplets.
The opening, "Here we are," is wonderfully slippery. It could be the crickets announcing themselves. It could include the human listener, caught in the sound along with them. And it echoes the weary idiom "here we are again," which we say when an old annoyance returns. Bonta splits that phrase apart. "Here we are" comes first, and "again" is held back until the next stanza, so the reader meets the situation before being told it is a repeat. The colon that follows works like a drumroll, and what it introduces is "a strange / dry din."
Those few words are the poem's richest. "Strange" hangs at the end of its line, so the unease arrives before its cause is named. "Din" is a blunt word for noise, and its short vowel and closing "n" are almost a chirp in themselves. "Dry" is the most interesting choice. A sound is given a texture, as if the noise were paper being rubbed or husks rattling. That suits crickets, which make their song by rubbing their wings together. The two stressed words "dry din" sit side by side with the same initial "d," so the line lands with two hard clicks.
After that the poem settles into a pattern. Both remaining stanzas begin with the identical line "again in," and the repetition does what the insects do. Sound also links the stanzas. "Din" is answered by "in," a rhyme with no end-of-line chime, and the "in" returns twice, as if the noise were an echo inside the poem's own vocabulary. In some accents "again" even chimes with "strange." The poem has no conventional rhyme scheme and needs none, because the echoes are small and compulsive, like the sound they describe.
The line breaks also matter. Each "again in" ends on a preposition, a word that is incomplete and leaves us waiting for its object. We are suspended "in" something, and the next line delivers what we are inside: first "the afternoon," then "the night." The prepositions suggest immersion, being surrounded by a sound rather than merely hearing it.
The shift from afternoon to night is the poem's only movement, and it is quietly clever. Crickets are commonly associated with darkness, so hearing them in the afternoon is a small surprise. By the end the din has covered the whole day. The line lengths shrink with it. "The afternoon" is a long, drawn-out phrase, with its stretched "oo" like a drone, and "the night" is clipped and dark. It is also the poem's only full stop. But "again" has taught us not to trust endings, so the full stop reads as a pause, not a conclusion. The sound will begin again tomorrow.
The poem is significant because its form matches its subject. A longer poem might describe the monotony of a persistent sound, whereas this one produces it, with repeated phrases, echoing vowels and short, insistent lines. It also shows how much a poem can do with very little, by choosing a handful of exact words, "strange" and "dry" above all, and letting the line breaks do the rest. After reading it, you may find yourself listening to the next steady sound you hear, and noticing how odd it is.