"Onward and upward" is about as worn as a phrase can get. It belongs on motivational posters and in speeches about progress, and it promises a bright, forward-pointing future. Dave Bonta borrows it as a title and then, in six short lines, turns it into something stranger and more honest. The upward movement is still there, but it happens in a garden, it ends in night rather than sunlight, and what powers it is hunger rather than ambition.
The first stanza opens with a small grammatical surprise: "the garden grows every / day another / ladder into night." We usually say a gardener grows tomatoes, or that plants grow. Here the garden itself is the grower, and what it produces is a ladder. The poem never says what kind of plants these are. Judging by the image, they might be vines, stalks or tendrils, anything that climbs, but the word "ladder" matters more than the species. It turns growth into a structure you could step onto. The line breaks add to the effect. "Every" is left hanging at the end of one line, and "day another" sits alone on the next, so the words stack like rungs. Time is measured in new ladders rather than in hours.
The destination is the odd part. Plants are supposed to reach for light, yet this ladder leads "into night." That could mean the growth continues as the day closes, or that the climb ends somewhere unknown and unlit. A reader might also hear a faint echo of Jacob's ladder from Genesis, which appears in a dream at night. The poem never points to that story, and it doesn't need to. What it does is overturn the slogan in the title. "Upward" is no longer a comfortable synonym for brighter and better. It is simply the direction of growth, and growth heads into darkness as readily as into light.
The second stanza switches from the garden to the first person: "I come up hungry." The phrase works two ways. Gardeners say seeds "come up" when seedlings break the surface, so the speaker is briefly a shoot pushing through soil. But "come up" also suggests climbing one of those ladders, or surfacing from sleep. The sound supports the idea. "Come," "up" and "hungry" all share the same short, low vowel, a thick, earthy sound that keeps the mouth near the ground even as the meaning rises.
Hunger is the emotional centre of the poem. It is not presented as a lack to be ashamed of. It is the engine, the reason anything climbs at all. Then comes the quiet finish: "to begin / to be." With no subject and no punctuation, the infinitives can be read as the purpose of the coming-up (I rise in order to begin, to be) or as the thing the hunger wants. The poem leaves both readings open. The final words are also built with care. "Begin" starts with the syllable "be," so the last line is the previous one stripped to its root. The stanza narrows as it goes, from five syllables to three to two, and the poem ends on the plainest verb in English.
That narrowing is part of the poem's argument. The first stanza describes a daily, repeating process, a new ladder every day, and the second suggests the speaker is beginning again each time. "Onward and upward" turns out to have no summit. There is no promotion, victory or arrival, only the repeated act of starting and of simply existing. Nothing is rhymed, nothing is capitalised except "I," and there is no punctuation to tell us where to stop. The lack of fences matches the subject, since a garden is an unfenced, unfinished thing that keeps pushing out of itself.
The poem is significant because of how much it holds in about twenty words. It takes a tired slogan about progress, plants it in soil, and finds that the real motive is appetite, the plain need to start and to exist. It also finds that beginning is not a single event but something repeated, each day, in the dark as much as in the light.