On a long afternoon, a group of children escape the drone of adult conversation, play soldiers in a cornfield, and stumble on something real: a dead cow in a sinkhole, with vultures overhead. Instead of recoiling, they climb down and dance on it. Dave Bonta's "Spoil" is about how children turn the raw fact of death into adventure, and about what that transformation both gains and covers up.
The opening sets up the contrast. The grownups' talk is "a scarcely modulated piano roll," a mechanical sound "as steady as an all-day rain," and the simile makes it something to flee, like weather. Outside, the children's imagination is already at work. The corn becomes an army, its tassels "shining like epaulets," and the "rebel yells" are matched by "Hollywood whoops of the wounded." That last phrase is telling. Their idea of battle comes from the movies, so even their pretend dying is secondhand. The poem is quietly setting the children's borrowed, theatrical violence against something that has not been staged.
That something arrives with "a scream that sounded too real." The vultures are drawn in precise, unsettling detail: "immense black pairs of wings, / each dangling a shrunken head, red / with glassy yellow eyes as empty / as outer space." The bald heads hang like trophies, and the comparison to outer space pushes the fear beyond the farm. The next image is bodily: the birds "must've risen / on the air sucked out of our lungs." Then comes one of the poem's shortest lines, "Then the smell hit us," which lands like the smell itself, with no cushioning.
The hinge is the three-line stanza that follows. "Alone, anyone would run. / But being a threesome we had to brave it, / couldn't go back with half a story." What drives the children is less courage than the need for a story to tell. Their bravery is social and a little vain, and the phrase "half a story" shows that they already think of the afternoon as something to be told afterward.
The descent into the sinkhole turns the language of warfare into the language of plunder. The cow's "bloated hide" bounces their rocks "like a trampoline," a comic image that sits beside something grim. The children behave like "gleeful privateers," drawn by "such bounty." The title "Spoil" works on several levels here. It means the spoils of victory, which is how the children see the carcass. It also means rot, which is what the reader smells. And it hints at something spoiled in the children's innocence, though the poem never says so outright. Both senses stay in play without one cancelling the other.
The ending shows the myth growing. The cow becomes "a dragon–a woolly / mammoth–the last dinosaur!" Each guess is bigger and further from the truth, and the dashes and exclamation mark carry the children's breathless one-upmanship. The children have also taken the vultures' place. The "foreshortened sky had no more room / for vultures," so the scavengers are shut out while the children feast on a victory. The final image is quietly ominous. Sunlight "scaled the hole's lip" (a pun that gives the dead cow its dragon's scales) and then "slipped away through the corn," and the day is ending as the children argue over the "provenance" of their "wondrous foe." That word belongs to auction houses and adult authority, as if the grownups' talk has followed them out into the field after all.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme, driven by enjambment. Lines break on small, hanging words ("where / the corn," "until, one / by one"), which keeps the reader tumbling forward the way the children tumble. The word "Now," alone at the end of a stanza, drops us into the next stanza just as they drop into the pit. Throughout, the poem speaks as "we," never "I," so the reader gets the group's excitement rather than one child's private reaction. The ampersands add a casual, rushed feel.
The poem is significant because it neither condemns the children nor lets them off. Their imagination is vivid and generous, and it is also a way of not looking. The reader is left seeing both the dragon and the cow.