Touch is the missing thing in this poem, and Dave Bonta builds all ten lines around its absence. The opening is an instruction rather than a scene: "Imagine having to go on with no way to touch." The speaker, we sense, has no choice but to live it, and the poem never says what she touches *with*. Only the final image answers that question.
The first stanza compresses a whole violation into a few plain phrases. She gives birth to "the child of who knows which / stoned soldier." The word "which," where we expect "who," turns the men into interchangeable units, and it hints, as an inference, that there was more than one. "Stoned" is flat and colloquial, with no heroic uniform and no war-poetry grandeur, only contempt. Then comes the one soft word in the stanza, "silky," and the line break holds it apart from its noun: "never knowing the silky / feel of his skin." The reader waits for the feeling, just as the speaker is denied it. "His" is also ambiguous. It could mean the soldier's skin or the baby's, and the dilemma that follows, "whether to caress / or to shove away, away," fits both. The repeated "away" sounds like a stammer, as though the shove has to be said twice before it can be done.
The second stanza turns from the abstract "Imagine" to a blunt "I," and the tone gets more physical. She nurses the baby "to ease the swelling in my breasts," so bodily relief comes before tenderness. Then: "I licked him like a cat — it was all the salt I could get." A mother cat cleans her kittens with her tongue, and the simile suggests that her tongue is doing the work her hands cannot. The salt works on two levels. It points to a world of scarcity where seasoning is a luxury, and it suggests sweat or tears on a newborn's skin. Love and hunger are tangled here, and the speaker does not sort them out. Her voice never rises into self-pity, and that restraint is where the horror comes from.
The form is spare. There are two stanzas of five lines each, free verse with no rhyme, only the faintest echo between "touch" and "which." The ampersands ("stoned soldier, & never knowing," "& began to point") give it the hurried look of speech or a note scribbled down. Both stanzas end on a gesture of the hand: the first on a shove the speaker may be unable to make, the second on hands that finally can act. That mirroring is the poem's quiet hinge.
The ending is the strangest image. "Were they not terrible, those severed hands, / when they stood back up at last / & began to point?" "Terrible" is used in its older sense of awe-inspiring as well as dreadful. The hands behave like the dead rising, standing upright on their own fingers, and what they do once risen is accuse. The private ordeal of the first stanza becomes public testimony. The question form draws the reader in as a witness who must say yes, they were terrible, and so must side with the hands.
The title may add a layer. "The Mountains of the Lion" matches the meaning of Sierra Leone, from the Portuguese for "lion mountains." If that is intended, the severed hands could recall the amputations of that country's civil war. The poem never states this, though, and it reads powerfully without it. Its details, a child of rape, a mother with no way to touch, hands that rise and point, could belong to any place where bodies have been used as weapons.
The poem is significant because it makes atrocity felt through one small, impossible choice: caress or shove away. It offers no consolation. The only justice it allows is an uncanny, almost mythic one, in which the mutilated body speaks when no one else will. In ten short lines it moves from the loneliest kind of silence to a gesture that cannot be ignored.