Six lines, no punctuation, no capital letters: Dave Bonta's "Volunteer" looks like a note slipped under a door, yet what it asks for is extreme. The speaker wants to be buried in a spring garden, emptied "of use and art," and filled with plague. Only in the second stanza does the reason arrive, and it is the oddest part. The news says "we must go to war," and this self-erasure is offered "so I may prove I did / what I could."
The title sets up a trap. "Volunteer" first suggests enlistment, a person stepping forward for a cause. But the speaker does not volunteer to fight. He volunteers to be a casualty, or rather a site. Gardeners know another meaning of the word: a volunteer is a plant that springs up unplanted, self-sown. Whether or not Bonta intended it, that sense fits the garden, and it adds a dark irony. The one thing this speaker is willing to grow is a body full of disease.
The first stanza is built on three imperatives with the same shape: "bury me," "empty me," "people me." The speaker gives orders, yet every order asks to be acted upon, so command and surrender sit in the same breath. The addressee is never named, which gives the lines the feel of a prayer or a litany. The verb "people" is the most striking choice. It turns plague into a population, a crowd that moves into the body as into an abandoned town. Against it stand the "spring garden," with its promise of growth, and the two things the speaker wants removed: "use and art," the practical and the imaginative, the very resources one might bring to a crisis. Asking to be emptied of usefulness is a peculiar way of trying to be useful.
There is no rhyme, and the music comes from repetition and shrinkage. The first stanza's lines run about eight syllables, then seven, then six, a steady exhale. The second stanza drops much further: roughly eleven syllables for the flat, newsreader line "for all the news is that we must go to war," then six, then three. The poem runs out of breath exactly where its logic runs out. The opening "for" can be read as "because," though it also faintly echoes "for all" in the sense of "despite," and that small wobble makes the line sound like something half-heard from a radio, a fact too large to argue with.
The ending is the poem's sharpest move. The line break after "I did" lets the sentence seem, for a beat, to claim an achievement. Then "what I could" shrinks it. Nearly every word in the last two lines is a single syllable, and "could" is the weakest of verbs, a word of limits. Notice also "prove." The speaker does not say he hopes to stop the war or help anyone. Judging by the poem's own logic, he wants evidence, an alibi for his conscience. The gesture is private and bodily, while the problem is collective and political. The pronouns trace this gap: "me" in the first stanza, "we" in the news, and finally a lonely "I."
That gap is what makes the poem worth reading. It names no particular war, date or place, so it stays open. Any reader who has felt helpless before large events may recognise the impulse behind it, when doing something turns extravagant and almost theatrical because nothing sensible seems available. Bonta lets the speaker's offer be both moving and slightly absurd. We can hear real anguish in it, and also the faint vanity of a person who needs to be seen to have tried. The poem does not settle which we should feel, and in six unpunctuated lines it leaves us holding both.