A poem that calls itself "unnecessary" before it has even begun is either apologizing or daring you to disagree. Dave Bonta's title shrugs at how many poems about crows already exist (the name may nod to Ted Hughes's Crow sequence, though that is an inference from the title, not something the poem states). What follows is twelve lines that are anything but shrugging. A crow wakes to a "velvet" morning, bleeds, rejects the place offered to him, flies restlessly up and down, and ends up as "the only trumpet / for a company of ants." The central idea seems to be the strange dignity of making a loud, raw noise when almost nobody is able to listen.
The construction is spare. There are six couplets, no capital letters, no punctuation apart from one possessive apostrophe, and no rhyme at all. Without commas or full stops, the lines run on a single breath, and the reader has to decide where the phrases break. The line breaks do a lot of work. "that earth where / he would not sit" stops on the word "where," so the sentence itself seems to hover without landing, much like the crow. In "went up / and down and up," the line literally rises and falls, and ending on "up" instead of "down" leaves the bird still in the air.
Sound matters more than rhyme here. The opening couplet is soft: "velvet life" slides along on its v and l sounds, and the word "velvet" feels like black feathers in dim light. Then the texture turns. "His wanting lung round and angry / bled raw salt" is clipped, and "bled raw salt" is three heavy stresses in a row, each one hitting like a blow. The crow is reduced to a single organ, a lung defined only by hunger ("wanting") and temper ("angry"). It is easy to picture the round, open beak mid-caw. That sudden jump from velvet to blood is the poem's first big movement, with comfort and injury sitting side by side.
The third couplet is the strangest. "many were the knives strange was the ink" flips its normal word order, giving it the ring of a saga or old ballad, as if the crow's troubles were being recorded in a myth. Knives and ink are an odd pair, and the poem never explains them. One possible reading is that writing itself is a kind of cutting, and that the black ink is the crow's own color. The echo of "strange" in "strangers' table" matters too. Whatever is "taken" there, whether it is the crow, the ink or the poem, is handed over to people who do not know it. The crow is invited into hospitality and refuses: "that earth where / he would not sit." Where he is welcome, he won't settle.
That refusal is what drives the last three couplets. "In discontent" is the one abstract phrase in a poem otherwise made of bodies and objects, and it states the crow's nature outright. He goes "up / and down and up" rather than sitting still, and the repeated "and" sounds like a bird pumping its wings, or like a restless mind that keeps starting again.
Then comes the ending, which is both comic and moving. A trumpet suggests fanfare, ceremony, an announcement to a crowd. But the crow's raw, bled-out call is "the only trumpet" and the audience is "a company of ants." The word "company" lends the insects a faintly military or theatrical dignity, while their size makes the whole gesture absurd. Ants may never hear him at all. The poem leaves open whether this is a joke at the crow's expense or a quiet tribute to him.
That uncertainty is what makes the poem worth reading. The title seems to anticipate the charge that it is not needed, and the poem answers by suggesting that need was never the point. The crow's cry does not wait for an audience worthy of it, and a poem about a crow, however small, can be a trumpet too. In twelve short lines, Bonta turns modesty into a kind of stubbornness.