Odes usually praise grand things, so it is a surprise that Dave Bonta's poem opens with a riddle instead of a salute: "What begins with this / singular L?" The letter is a drawing of the tool itself, a handle and a blade meeting at an angle. Calling it "italic" suggests the slant of the hoe as it is swung. From the first line the poem treats the hoe as something that writes, and the ground as the page.
The answer to the riddle is a rush of beginnings. The first is "new worms, certainly," and that confident "certainly" sets a matter-of-fact tone, as if the speaker were reporting from the garden rather than inventing. Then the scale jumps: "whole new cities / of aerobic bacteria." The word "aerobic" is precise, since these organisms live on air, and it hints that the hoe's first gift is simply letting air into packed earth. "Stones from rocks" is the shortest and bluntest line, and it shows that the hoe breaks things as well as starts them. Beginning and breaking are the same motion here.
The list then turns to weeds: pigweed, lamb's-quarters, purslane, dock. The names are plain and a little comic, like a roll call of unwanted guests. The irony is that a hoe is normally used to kill weeds, yet here it wakes their "seeds / that had lain dormant for decades." The line break after "seeds" leaves the word hanging, as if a seed were waiting in the white space. The verb "stirred" is gentle, even tender, which makes the hoe sound less like a weapon than a spoon turning a pot. The poem accepts that cultivation always stirs up more than the gardener asked for.
At "This italic L spells," the poem moves from accident to intention. Now the hoe forms "hills for yams, / channels for irrigation water, / a level bed for flowers." These are shapes made on purpose, and "spells" keeps the writing metaphor going. Just as a letter becomes a word, one scrape becomes a hill, a channel, a bed. The poem's most striking image comes next: "Its thick tongue / uncovers an instant palate." The blade is a tongue, and the freshly cut earth is the roof of a mouth it has just exposed. The image is odd and physical, and it prepares the sound that follows. When you say the letter L, your tongue presses against your palate.
So the hoe begins to talk: "Luh, it says. / Luh luh luh luh." The wide gaps on the page work as pauses between strokes, each syllable a blade biting the dirt. The sound is also close to baby babble, the kind of first syllable a speaker makes before words exist, which fits a poem about origins. The poem never says what the L stands for, but the words that gather around it are easy to hear, such as land, labor and life. That is an inference, though, and the poem lets the sound stay open.
The final sentence changes the mood completely: "The shocks travel / up the aching arms." The playful catalogue has been the view from the hoe's side, and now we get the view from the person holding it. Every new city of bacteria and every awakened seed costs a jolt through the gardener's body. The line break after "travel" lets the pain run on to the next line, and the soft vowels of "aching arms" make the ending tired rather than triumphant.
Formally the poem is free verse. It has short, uneven lines, no rhyme and no regular meter, and it moves in quick phrases much like the quick strokes of hoeing. The only real rhyme is in the title, "Ode to a Hoe," where the long *o* sounds make a small joke about the grandness of the form.
The poem matters because it makes manual work and language into the same act. It praises the hoe while admitting that the tool is destructive, that it grows weeds along with flowers, and that it hurts the person who uses it. It also gives a very small thing, one letter and one blade, the power to start whole worlds.