Twenty-odd words, two short stanzas, and not a single full stop. Dave Bonta's "Hawking" is a poem that seems to vanish as you read it, much like the gust it describes. On the surface it records one moment: a wing arrives from the sea just as a "master" dies, and a strong wind pulls "our thoughts away." Its central idea is that grief, or awe at a great person's passing, can't be held in one place. It gets carried off by something larger and wilder than us.
The most striking feature is grammar. Neither stanza has a main verb. "A wing coming from sea" and "a great gust calling" are both fragments built on -ing words, and the effect is that nothing in the poem ever finishes happening. The wing is always still coming, the gust always still calling. Because there is no past tense, the death of the master never settles into history either. It stays an event hanging in the air.
Sound reinforces this. The poem has no rhyme, but it is full of quiet echoes. "Wing," "coming" and "calling" all end in that ringing -ing, and the title, "Hawking," ends the same way, so the word seems to throw its sound forward into the poem. "Great gust" is a small cluster of hard g and st sounds, and you can almost feel the air hit your face as you say it. Even "master" has a hidden detail. Its first syllable, "mast," sits close to the sea in the line above, as if the dead man's title were already carrying a ship's vocabulary. The poem never says this, but the sound is there.
Then there are the missing words. "From sea" drops the article we would normally expect ("from the sea"), which makes the sea feel less like a place and more like an element, a source. The wing, too, belongs to no named bird. It is a fragment of a creature, so we see motion and not an animal. Lowercase letters and the absence of punctuation add to the feeling that the lines are drifting rather than being declared.
The title is where the poem opens up, and also where it stays deliberately unsettled. "Hawking" is the name of a sport, falconry, in which a trained bird is called back to its handler. That sense makes "master" resonate as a falconer's word, and it makes "calling" interesting, because here the call runs the other way. The wind calls *us*, and instead of a trained bird returning to a hand, our thoughts are the ones pulled off into the open. Alternatively, "Hawking" is also a surname, and a reader may take the poem as an elegy for a famous thinker. The poem never confirms this, and the text alone gives us no way to decide. What it does give us is a word that works as both noun and action, which matches the poem's refusal to settle.
The shift in pronoun matters, too. The first stanza is pure observation: a wing, a death, no one present. Only in the second stanza does "our" appear, and with it a community of mourners or onlookers. The poem moves from the world to us in the space between its stanzas. And what happens to "us" is not a neat lesson or a consoling memory. Our thoughts are called *away*, which could mean away from sorrow, away from the dead master, or simply away from ourselves. The final word is "away," and the poem ends on an open vowel, like a breath let go.
That ambiguity is much of what makes the poem worth reading. It has the compression of a haiku, in which an image is set beside an event and the reader is left to feel the link, but it sounds more like a stray line of weather than a formal exercise. It trusts a few concrete things, a wing, a wind, the sea, to carry a feeling too large for explanation. A poem about death might be expected to mourn loudly. This one lets the wind speak instead, and the silence it leaves is the point.