Dave Bonta's "Prospectors" is a short, hard-edged poem about searching for something valuable in painful ground. The speaker recalls a place where "we" met now and then, doing a kind of mining, but what gets dug up is "abuses," and all that comes of it is "very small stones." The reward is tiny, and it's still "locked up in the dirt," hard to reach.
The second half widens out. The fields can't hold "our bodies," which are "lost and dangerous," and whole places are "blown away." People and land seem to be scattered by forces bigger than they are. The closing image, "ships of lack," is strange and memorable: vessels with nothing aboard, drifting wherever they're pushed.
The mood is bleak and uneasy, though quiet rather than loud. The speaker sounds weary and watchful, and the poem doesn't say exactly what happened. Judging by the imagery, it's about harm, displacement and the thin comfort of what survives.