Four short lines, no punctuation, no capital letters, and Dave Bonta's "Groundsman" still manages a small coup. The people who look after a park are quietly dismissed, and the replacement is a mole.
The first couplet sets up the old regime: "we come to the park / with a barber's cruel hands". The title promises a groundsman, someone who mows, trims and edges, but the poem turns that work into barbering. Grass becomes hair and the lawn becomes a scalp. A haircut is usually an ordinary, even gentle service, so "cruel" jars. It suggests the closeness of the cut and a tidiness forced on something that never asked for it. The poem also gives us "hands" rather than shears or mowers. With the machinery gone, the cruelty feels bodily and personal. And the word "we" is easy to miss. The speaker does not blame some careless stranger but includes himself and us. Even "come to" has a faint air of intrusion, like visitors arriving to rearrange a house that isn't theirs.
Then comes the pivot, "but". The second couplet introduces "the land's new contractor", and the deadpan office language is where the humour lies. A contractor is hired and outsourced, and the word implies a client. Here the client is the land itself, which has done its own hiring. "New" implies we were the old contractors and our contract has lapsed. The replacement is "a mole", the creature every neat-lawn owner dreads, whose hills break up smooth turf. The poem promotes the pest to professional. The title shifts as a result. If a groundsman is a person of the ground, the mole, working literally within it, has a better claim to the name than we do.
The last line, "and it is out of light", is the most open. On the plainest reading, the mole lives and works without light, in dark tunnels. But "out of" can also mean having run short, as we say we are out of money, or being placed beyond something's reach. The poem doesn't say whether this is a lack or a kind of power. What the line does make clear is a contrast of surface and depth. The barber works in plain daylight on what everyone can see. The mole works unseen, beneath the surface, where our scissoring cannot follow. There is also no full stop. The poem simply stops, as if the tunnel carries on past the edge of the page.
The sound and shape of the lines support this. There is no rhyme, which suits a poem about giving up control. The lines are uneven: the first is a brisk five syllables, the second only slightly longer, the third stretches to about ten, and the last drops back to six. The long third line carries the pompous word "contractor", the longest in the poem, and then the poem falls away into the short final line, as if sinking underground. The first couplet is full of hard, clipped k-sounds in "come", "park", "barber's" and "cruel", which gives it a snipping quality. In the second couplet the sounds soften toward "land's", "mole" and "light", and the repeated l-sounds slow the poem down. A faint echo of "cruel" in "mole" quietly links the two figures, even as the poem sets them against each other.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. It never uses a word like "nature" or "ecology" and never lectures. One metaphor, the barber, and one reversal, the mole as contractor, are enough to undermine the idea that people are in charge of the land. The tone stays dry and almost amused, but there is real unease beneath it. The surface we trim and tidy is not the whole of the place, and something below it, unseen and in the dark, may be managing it better than we are. For a student, it shows how a poem can make a complete argument in about twenty words, and how much a single well-chosen adjective like "cruel" can carry.