Nine short lines, no rhyme, no capital letters, not a single full stop: Dave Bonta's "Lumbermen" looks as though it has been felled and trimmed down to bare wood. What it says is just as stripped. A hillside has been logged, and the speaker, looking at what is left, can find nothing in the timber that recalls the living place it came from. The central idea is that turning a hill into lumber is not harvesting but destruction, and that the real loss is a kind of joy the poem calls "honest."
The first stanza rests on an ambiguity worth slowing down for. "In the raw timber / I see nothing of the hill / but ruins." Read one way, the cut wood carries no trace of the hill's life, because it has been separated from its place. Read another, the timber is itself the ruin, the rubble left when something whole is broken. "Raw" does double work. It describes unfinished lumber, but it also suggests a wound, something skinned and exposed. The title promises people, yet the only figure here is the watching "I." The men are held back, as if the speaker must face the damage before naming who caused it.
The second stanza breaks into exclamation: "what a dreadful thing it is / to look down the precipice / into a grave." The first line is the most regular in the poem, almost a steady walking beat, like an old-fashioned phrase sighed aloud. Then the lines shorten, and the last one, "into a grave," drops away in three words. The form acts out the meaning, since the verse itself seems to fall off an edge. The imagery turns from horizontal to vertical, from looking at material to feeling vertigo. Judging by these images, the cleared slope has left a sharp drop, and the speaker converts it into a burial. The hill is not merely damaged but dead, and the speaker stands at its edge like a mourner. "Dreadful" is a heavy, nearly biblical word, and the poem delivers it without irony or hedging.
Only in the last stanza do the lumbermen arrive, and they arrive as commerce. "Board on board" has the plod of stacking, plank laid on plank, a pile growing like a tally. Then the vocabulary turns to war. "Men full of pillage" recalls what armies do to towns, and "full of" makes it sound like appetite, even drunkenness. The sting comes in the final phrase, "making money / of some honest joy." The usual idiom would be "making money out of," and the clipped "of" is blunter. "Some" is dismissive too. To these men the joy has no name and is just raw material that can be converted. There is also a quiet reversal. Logging is often praised as honest work, but the poem gives that word to the joy the hill offered, and denies it to the men.
Sound binds the poem together without any rhyme. "Raw" and "board" share a long, open vowel in many accents, so the first and last stanzas echo each other like bookends. "Hill" and "pillage" share their *-ill-* sound, which links the victim to the crime. The long *a* of "grave" is picked up again in "making," as if the burial and the profit were one event.
The poem's progress matters as much as its images. It moves from "I" to the impersonal "it" to "men," from seeing to feeling to accusing. The culprits are named last, after we have already stood at the grave, so blame arrives with the weight of something already felt. The poem also sets two vocabularies against each other, ruins, precipice and grave on one side, board and money on the other, and lets the second look shabby beside the first. It never says where or when the hill stood, and it does not need to. In nine lines it makes a stack of ordinary planks look like evidence, and it leaves the reader asking what was lost for them to exist.