Six short lines, thirty-one words, and not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's "Bird of prey" is small enough to read in a breath, yet it keeps unfolding after you've finished. It opens with a scene, a falcon appearing "where we fish", and then moves quickly inward, from the bird to the speaker's own mind and finally to the speaker's own hunger.
The first couplet sets the stage. Fishing is a human activity built on waiting, on casting a line into water you can't see through and trusting something is down there. Into that patient, ordinary place comes a predator, and the poem calls it "simple as a master." The simile is odd and worth pausing over. We usually think mastery is complicated, but here it looks effortless, stripped of fuss. The falcon hunts without doubt or hesitation, which is exactly what the human fishers lack. That contrast seems to drive the rest of the poem. The title's "prey" also quietly works both ways: the bird preys, but the people below, who have come to take something from the water, are hunters too.
The second couplet turns to the speaker's confession: "I do not believe but must believe / in the supple art of folly." This is the longest line in the poem, and it feels like it. The repeated "believe" brackets the line, and the small word "but" hinges the contradiction in the middle. The poem never says what the speaker doesn't believe in, which leaves the paradox open. It might be art, or faith, or the whole business of waiting for a catch. What the speaker does believe in is "folly," and the adjective "supple" changes the word. Folly is usually stiff and embarrassing, but a supple folly bends and adapts and has skill in it. There is also a faint sound-echo between "simple" in the first couplet and "supple" in the second, one vowel apart, as if the speaker's flexible foolishness is a human cousin of the falcon's clean simplicity. That link is my reading, but the near-match of sounds invites it.
The last couplet is the strangest. "To see with an ear" is a mixed-up sense, a kind of synesthesia. Perhaps it describes the fisher watching the water while really listening for a splash, or a cry overhead. Perhaps it describes the kind of attention the poem asks for, one that gives up sharp, falcon-like eyesight for something more receptive. Either way, the speaker wants to perceive in a way the body doesn't allow, and that wanting is another kind of folly. Then comes "to eat my own," and the poem simply stops. "Own" is a word that needs a noun, and none arrives. The reader has to supply one: my own words, my own kind, my own folly, my own heart. Because the title has told us we're dealing with a bird of prey, the line reads as a predator's appetite turned inward. The speaker is both hunter and food. That reading is an inference, but the grammar of the ending, a sentence that breaks off at the point of consumption, supports it.
The poem's construction is part of its meaning. Three couplets give it a balanced, almost ritual shape, while the lack of rhyme and punctuation means the lines never click shut. Only "I" is capitalized, so the first-person voice appears just once and stands out among the lowercase lines. The infinitives that close the poem, "to see" and "to eat," have no subject, so they read like vows or cravings rather than statements. The sounds are quietly worked too. The *f* of "falcon" and "fish" binds the opening line, and the soft *s* sounds of "simple," "master," "supple" and "folly" run through the first four lines like a hush.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does without explaining itself. It gives us one image of effortless certainty, one admission of doubt, and one half-finished act of self-devouring, and it leaves the reader to decide how they connect. The tension it points to is real: to make anything, or to fish for anything, you have to act as if you believe while knowing you don't quite. The falcon doesn't have that problem, and the speaker does, but the poem suggests that being foolish, supple and hungry might be the human way of getting close to a master's simplicity.