A gust, a street, a bad leg: Dave Bonta's "Gimpy" fits a whole small drama into ten words. A walker is caught in a high wind, turns around, and feels sorry for part of their own body. There is no plot beyond that, but the poem manages to be funny and tender at once.
The central scene is deliberately unexplained. Why is the speaker "walking backwards along the street"? One reading is that they have turned their back to the wind to keep it out of their face. Another is that the gale is shoving them the wrong way. Either way, the body is improvising against a force much bigger than itself. Backwards walking is awkward for anyone, and for someone with a weak leg it is worse, which is exactly the point. The poem never tells us what is wrong with the leg or how long it has been wrong. All we get is the title's nickname and the closing sigh.
That nickname matters. "Gimpy" is a blunt, slightly unkind word, the sort that gets thrown around a playground. Here it seems to be something the speaker could say about themselves, in the way people mock their own weaknesses to take the sting out of them. Then the last line arrives with "my poor leg," and the tone shifts toward sympathy. The leg is spoken of almost as a separate creature, a pet or a small child who has been put through too much. The possessive "my" is affectionate, and the contrast between a "high wind" and such a little complaint is gently comic. Notice, too, that the poem has no "I." The speaker exists only through that one word "my," as if the leg were the person.
The construction supports all this. There is no rhyme, and the lines are uneven: roughly two syllables, then seven, then three. The poem is lopsided, and it limps. The dash after "high wind" works like a held breath. Then the long middle line runs on without punctuation, and its rhythm, WALKing BACKwards aLONG the STREET, has the steady tread of someone pushing on. The last line breaks that rhythm. "My poor leg" ends on two heavy stresses back to back, "poor" and "leg," like a foot coming down badly. The poem makes the stumble the reader hears as well as the stumble the speaker feels.
The sound texture is quietly doing work as well. "Wind," "walking," and "backwards" all share a "w" or "b" push of breath, as if the weather has got into the verbs. The hard "k" and "g" sounds in "walking," "backwards," and "leg" (and in the title, "Gimpy") give the poem a slightly clumsy, clattering feel that suits its subject.
The imagery is spare but not flat. Walking backwards means the street unrolls away from you, and you see where you have been rather than where you are going. That may be reading too much into a ten-word poem, but it is a pleasing extra layer: pain and difficulty make us retreat, even look back. The poem does not insist on this idea, and the plain, everyday phrase "along the street" keeps the scene humble.
What makes "Gimpy" worth reading is how much it does by leaving things out. It is built like a very short, haiku-like poem, with a weather image first, a human moment after, and a gap between them that the reader has to cross. The weather is impersonal and enormous, while the body is private and small. Putting them side by side produces a mix of feelings that a longer poem might have explained away: embarrassment, humor, and self-compassion. The poem lets the speaker be pitiful and ridiculous at once, and it forgives them for both.
For students, it is a good example of how tone can be set by tiny choices. Change "my poor leg" to "my bad leg" and the sympathy disappears. Take away the title and the joke is lost. In a poem this short, every word has to carry weight, and here even the limp has been written into the rhythm.