Fifteen words, six short lines, not a single comma or full stop: Dave Bonta's "Age of extinction" is small enough to slip through your fingers, and that smallness is part of how it works. The title names an enormous subject, a era in which living things are disappearing, and the poem declines to treat it at that scale. It offers one strange image and one cold word, and lets them do the damage.
The first couplet, "with no night / in the world," hangs without a main verb, as if the sentence has lost its footing before it begins. Read beside the title, the most natural interpretation (the poem never explains itself, so this is an inference) is a world so flooded with artificial light that darkness no longer arrives. The line break matters. "with no night" stops for a beat, and in that beat the night is truly missing. Then "in the world" opens out to the largest container available. The vocabulary is plain, almost childlike, yet the claim is vast.
The second couplet turns on "how small / the others seem." The sentence tips from statement into exclamation, half wonder and half dismay. The word "others" is never pinned down. It could mean stars washed out by the glare, other species, or other people, and the poem's refusal to choose is part of its point. A pronoun that vague turns everything that isn't "us" into an indistinct crowd, which may be exactly how a diminished world looks from inside it. The verb "seem" also deserves attention. Light pollution doesn't shrink the stars, it only makes them appear small, so the poem quietly puts the fault in the way we look rather than in the things looked at. The line break leaves "small" alone at the end of its line, and it sits there looking just as reduced as its meaning.
Then comes the drop. "fallen again / to arithmetic" carries older echoes of falling stars, fallen angels, and a fall from grace. The word "again" implies this is a habit rather than an accident. Arithmetic is the humblest sort of mathematics, made of counting, adding and subtracting, and it is also the language in which extinction usually reaches us: so many left, so many lost. The poem enacts the fall in its layout, with "to" tipping over the line break and landing on the longest, most clerical word in the poem. Four syllables of dry ticking close the poem.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Each line carries two or three stresses, and the rhythm is that of speech slowed to a murmur. What the poem has instead is a quiet network of sound. "Small" and "fallen" share their open *all* vowel, which ties diminishment to descent. "Others" and "arithmetic" share a *th*, which links the nameless many to the number that swallows them. The lowercase start and the lack of any final punctuation leave the thought unfinished, as if the loss it describes has not stopped.
One ambiguity keeps the ending from settling. Grammatically, it is the others who have "fallen" into arithmetic, reduced from living or shining things to quantities. But the word "fallen" belongs just as much to the one doing the counting. If the stars, or the species, are made small by being tallied, then the tally is itself a kind of moral lapse, and the speaker is implicated in it.
That is where the poem's significance lies. It writes about ecological loss without sermon, statistic or lament, and it points out, without a single figure of its own, that reaching for figures can be a way of looking away. Its brevity is a quiet refusal to count. The poem lets the reader feel what a world without night would take from us, then leaves the last word to the thing we do instead of mourning.