Dave Bonta's "Poachers" starts with a blunt image: anyone who kills a wild elephant, whether a king or a criminal, takes the animal's life the way you might take a river no one has ever heard. The comparison is odd and quietly sad. A river nobody hears is still a river, and the loss is just as real even though no one witnessed it.
The middle lines call the killing "an ungoing / ungrown narrative," something that happens "in the sticks," far from where people pay attention. It sounds like a story that never develops and never gets told properly, because it's treated as remote and unimportant.
Then the poem turns. "When the war is all here / holding us" pulls the violence close. The speaker seems to say that what we push away as distant is actually around us. The mood is hushed, uneasy and grieving, with a sense that the killing out there and the war in here are connected.