Dave Bonta turns a humble tool into a playful puzzle of shapes and sounds. The poem begins by treating the crowbar's curved end like a piece of punctuation: a comma, an apostrophe, a backslash, even a question mark that has lost its dot. Then it jokes that a crow would never ask questions, since the crowbar is all about firm, declarative action. Wordplay on "crow" and "bar" runs through the opening, and the tool becomes "heavy as Wednesday," a nicely odd way to capture a dull, weighty midweek feeling.
The speaker's tone is affectionate and curious. Imagining the crowbar pushed into a sidewalk crack, he wonders whether an "iron tree" might branch out from it. That thought leads to the ending, where the curved end recalls a sprouting seed, a cotyledon just beginning to split apart. The mood is quiet, witty, and observant, finding growth and life inside something cold and metal.