A "bone to pick" is a grievance, a small and very human thing, and Dave Bonta's six-line poem takes the phrase at its word and then carries it up a hill. The title does a good deal of the work. The word "bones" never appears in the poem itself, yet it hangs over every line. The hill has a "body," the ground underfoot is "stone," and the people on it are, in the old idiom, picking at something. Because the bones are missing from the text, the reader has to put them back.
The poem's central idea is that human squabbling looks small against the thing we squabble on. Its tone is quiet, even wry, and it never lectures. It simply sets a trivial argument beside a landscape that has been lying there far longer than the argument has, and lets the contrast speak.
The first couplet, "over the body / of a hill," has no verb at all. It is a scene rather than an action, and the opening word "over" works in two ways. It can be spatial, as in travelling over a hill. It can also be the "over" of disputes, as in quarrelling over something. Calling the hill a "body" turns the landscape into something that could be dead, and "over the body" suggests mourners, or scavengers, standing above a corpse. That is an inference, but the title's bones and the later "feast" both support it.
The second couplet gives us the first verb and the first person: "we quarrel / on a journey." The words are deliberately plain, with no adjectives and nothing to explain what the quarrel is about. The line break after "we quarrel" lets the conflict stand alone for a beat before "on a journey" folds it back into ordinary travel. A journey can be a walk up a hill, but it can also be a life, so the quarrel becomes something people carry with them wherever they go. The "we" is the poem's only moment of confession. The speaker is not watching other people argue but is part of the argument.
Then the grammar changes again. "think how people are" is an instruction, and "we" widens into "people." The speaker steps back from the personal quarrel and looks at the species. The sentence also breaks off at "are." We expect an adjective, such as greedy, loud or small, and the poem leaves us to choose one. The final image, "a feast of stone," carries the punchline. A feast promises abundance and company, and people at feasts are famously noisy, quick to argue and quick to grab. But stone cannot be eaten. The feast is a joke at humanity's expense, since people fight at a table with nothing on it. It also completes the title's bone-picking image, because the hill is the carcass and the stone is what is left to pick over. "Stone" is a heavy, final word, a single long syllable that lands like a door closing.
The form is as spare as the argument. There is no rhyme, no punctuation and no capital letters. The poem is three couplets, and the lines swell and contract in a pattern a careful reader can count: five syllables then three, three then four, five then five. The first two couplets move in short, uneven steps, like walkers on rough ground, and the last couplet evens out into two full lines. That evenness gives the final observation a settled, almost proverbial weight. The sounds support this. The hard *b* of "body" echoes the buried "bones" of the title, and the harsh *k* of "quarrel" and "think" is the poem's most abrasive music, while "hill" and "stone" bring it down to something lower and more final.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. In its compression it resembles a haiku, though it makes no claim to be one, and it asks us to hold two scales in the mind at once: the human, with its grievances, and the geological, with its patience. It also reawakens a worn-out idiom. Most of us say "a bone to pick" without picturing a bone, and here the phrase becomes a landscape again, with a hill, some stones and a few bickering walkers. After reading it, the idiom is hard to hear without also hearing the silence of the hill.