Stone is supposed to be where things end. We carve it into headstones and statues so the dead stay put. Dave Bonta's "Incubation" opens by cracking that assumption in two lines: "stone fathers / live on as eggs." The "fathers" could be literal parents, ancestors or an inherited tradition, and the poem doesn't say. That vagueness lets the image carry more. An egg looks like stone, smooth and oval and cold, yet it is the one stone-like object with something alive inside. The fathers are not memorialised here. They are kept as potential.
Then the roles reverse. "We must be content / to sit on change." We become the brooding bird, responsible for warming what the fathers left behind. "Sit on" works two ways. It means to brood, and it also means to hold something back, as in sitting on news or a decision. Incubation is active patience, doing nothing visible while something happens anyway. The word "must" admits that we don't control the timing, and "content" sounds like resignation turned into a discipline. It is also odd to sit on "change," since an egg is a thing and change is a process. The poem treats an abstraction as an object that can be kept warm.
What hatches is not a chick. "Till it fables" turns a noun into a verb, so change becomes narrative, a story told. The grammar performs the idea: a word that wasn't a verb is pushed into action, a small hatching inside the language. The title adds a second layer, since incubation also names the stage in creative work when an idea gestates unseen. Given where the poem ends, writing seems to be part of what is at stake, though that is an inference from the imagery.
The last line is the strangest: "varnishing paper for books." With no punctuation, the participle has no clear subject. It could describe the fabling change, or the "we" who sit and wait. Either way, varnish is a glossy coat that protects and also glazes over. Fables preserve, but they may also polish away the rough living thing. Right after "content," the word "books" invites a pun on a book's contents, which may or may not be intended. The final image also completes a circle. Varnish dries into a hard, shiny shell, much like an egg's, and much like stone. The fathers begin as stone and become eggs, and what hatches is hardened again into pages. The poem doesn't say whether that is rescue or loss, and it leaves the reader to decide.
The form supports this ambiguity. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters, which gives the poem the unfussy look of something found rather than built. It splits into a two-line stanza and a four-line one. The opening lines are the shortest, three and four syllables, as clipped as stone, and the closing line is the longest at seven, as if the poem were expanding as its contents hatch. Sound ties the lines together. The long "o" runs through "stone," "on," "content" and "on," like a low, steady hum, and the f of "fathers" returns in "fables," linking the inheritance to the story made from it. The poem is also bracketed by two plural nouns, "eggs" and "books," both ending in a hard consonant. Both are containers, one holding a creature and the other holding contents, so the whole journey is compressed into the distance between them.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into seven lines. It offers a view of inheritance in which the past is not something to look at but something to sit on until it changes. It also suggests, without announcing it, that writing is a kind of brooding, and that the finished book may be both the hatching and the new shell. Its unresolved last line, with a gleam that could be preservation or sealing in, gives readers something to keep turning over.