Dave Bonta's elegy remembers an old woman who lived alone in a hollow, ready for a fight that never quite ended. When her mind failed, others took her away from the house where she had stayed for forty years with her dog, her shotgun, a color TV, and her dead brother's artificial legs, which stand at the top of the stairs like a sentry.
The second stanza explains what she was guarding. Her family's land was sold and clear-cut by an owner who never saw it and ignored her mother's dying order not to let anyone lumber the mountain again. The final lines are chilling: the mountain could not survive a third cutting, "& neither will you."
The speaker doesn't announce grief. Instead the poem is plain, specific, and quietly respectful, even a little darkly funny in its details. The mood is sorrowful and angry, treating her stubborn watchfulness as loyalty rather than madness, and suggesting that her fate and the land's are bound together.