Three lines, no punctuation, one capital letter: Dave Bonta's "Strix" offers almost nothing to hold on to, and that is part of its force. The title does the first piece of work. Strix is the Latin word for owl, and in Roman tradition it could also mean a night-flying bird of ill omen. So a creature of darkness is already hovering over the page before line one begins. Yet the poem holds back the plain English word "owl" until the very end, making us wait through a god and a joy before the bird arrives.
What the poem seems to be about is an encounter that feels like worship, though it is not a comfortable one. The god here is lowercase, not the capitalised God of doctrine, and he is "odd as the world." That comparison is sly. We usually treat the world as the normal background against which things look odd. Here the world itself is the measure of strangeness, so this god is exactly as baffling, and as undeniable, as existence. The sound of the line backs this up. The word "odd" is buried inside "god," so "god odd" runs together in the mouth, as if the strangeness were lodged in the name.
The second line shifts from what the god is to what the god does: "who practices that great joy." The verb is worth pausing on. We normally feel joy, but here it is practised, like a prayer, a musical scale or a monk's discipline. Joy becomes a skill carried out again and again. The poem never says what the joy consists of. The little word "that" points at it as if it were obvious, and the reader is left to supply it. Judging by the owl, we might guess at silence, patience or watchfulness, but the poem stays quiet on the point, much as an owl would.
The last line brings the owl in, and its grammar rewards slow reading. Both the god and the owl are called "who," not "which" or "that," so each is treated as a person. The sentence can also be read so that the god and the owl merge: the owl is the god, or at least the one who practises the joy. Then comes the human response, "who I give ground to." To give ground is to retreat, as in a contest or on a narrow path, but it also holds the literal word "ground," the earth under the speaker's feet. The speaker steps back from territory and, by implication, from importance. The line even ends on the preposition "to," pointing away from the speaker toward the owl, as though the sentence itself were deferring.
The poem's sounds link the divine to this humble gesture. A hard g runs through it: "god," "great," "give," "ground." The grand words and the small, yielding ones share a consonant, as if reverence and retreat were the same movement. "Owl" and "ground" share a vowel, and "world" and "owl" share a closing l, so the key words echo each other quietly. There is no end rhyme. The lines grow from roughly six syllables to seven to eight, depending on how you say "owl," so the poem seems to widen as it goes, like wings opening. The speaker's "I," the only capital in the text, sits in the middle of the final line, hemmed in by "who" and "give ground."
With no full stop, the poem stops without concluding, and the encounter seems to go on after the words end.
What makes it significant is how much attitude it fits into so little space. It treats awe as a form of humility and religious feeling as something that can happen outside doctrine, in front of a wild animal. It also reverses the usual order of nature poems, in which the human observes and the creature is observed. Here the observer yields, and the poem is the record of that small retreat.