Four short lines are enough for Dave Bonta to turn an ordinary job, planting a field, into something closer to a burial and a blessing at once. On the surface, the poem describes what farmers do: they put things into the earth. But the things named are not seeds. They are "our business, our absence, ourselves." The central idea is that working the land means giving yourself to it, and that what is left at the end of the day is not a harvest or a balance sheet but "nothing but light / in the evening fields."
The first line is plain on purpose. "We put in the ground" sounds like everyday speech, the way people say they "put in a crop" or "put in a day's work." Because the voice is so matter-of-fact, the list that follows startles us. It moves in three steps, and each step is stranger and more intimate than the last. "Business" is the practical side of farming: its tasks, schedules and worries. "Absence" is harder to pin down. Perhaps it means the empty hours when the workers are lost in the labor and absent from everything else. Perhaps it means the gap that death will leave. Perhaps it means the self-forgetting that hard work brings. The poem doesn't choose, and the word is richer for that. Then comes "ourselves," the shortest item and the heaviest. Planting becomes sowing one's own life, and "put in the ground" starts to echo the language of a grave.
The repeated "our" gives the line a litany-like pull, and the sounds support it. The soft, hissing s's in "business," "absence" and "ourselves" make the line sound like breath being let out. The dash at its end works as a pause before the drop into the final couplet, a bit like the moment when the last handful of earth has been spread and the worker straightens up.
What follows is the poem's one real image. "Nothing but light" can be read in more than one way. It may describe what we see: after the work is done, the field looks empty, and the low evening sun is all that is visible. It may describe what we have become, since having given business, absence and self to the soil, we are left as pure brightness. Judging by the imagery, there may also be a quiet nod to how crops live on sunlight. The phrase holds loss ("nothing") and radiance ("light") together, and the poem never says which wins. "Evening" adds another layer. It is the end of the working day, but it also suggests the end of a life, and the golden hour that makes a field beautiful just before it goes dark.
The form is spare and unrhymed, closer to a spoken thought than a song. The line lengths are uneven in a telling way. The opening line is short, the second stretches out to hold its three-part list, and the last two shrink again. The poem swells in the middle, then settles. The enjambment between "light" and "in the evening fields" lets the final phrase come to rest on "fields," a concrete, open word that sets the human drama inside a landscape. The grammar also does something quiet. The title says "Farmer," singular, but the poem speaks as "we." The numeral in the title hints that this is one of several attempts at the same subject, though the poem stands perfectly well alone. Either way, the single farmer becomes a shared figure, and the reader is drawn into the "we" along with everyone else who has ever worked toward something and disappeared into it.
The poem matters because of how little it says. It avoids sentiment and explanation, and it trusts three nouns and one image to carry a whole view of work and mortality. In its small size the poem is itself like a seed, compact and plain on the outside, with something large buried inside. A reader can pass over it in seconds, but the word "absence" keeps working underground, and the closing light stays after the page is turned.