In Dave Bonta's "Spring ahead," spring arrives not with blossoms or birdsong but with a squirrel that seems to have a guilty conscience. Across five small scenes, the poem gathers the comic, slightly off-kilter signs that the season has turned. Quietly, it sets them against the one thing people do to mark the season by decree: move the clocks. The title plays on this. It echoes the familiar reminder to "spring forward," but it also names the season itself, pressing on ahead whether or not anyone has adjusted their watch.
The form is spare. Five unrhymed tercets, each a self-contained moment, recall haiku in their compression and their habit of noting one thing and moving on. The lines don't follow a strict syllable count, though. "The squirrel moves quickly away" runs longer than the lines around it, as if hurrying off. Without rhyme, the poem relies on its verbs for energy: *reburied*, *run*, *turn*, *rustle*, *search*. The ampersands in the first two stanzas make the lines look like field notes scribbled in haste, and they give way to plain "and"-less phrasing later, as the speaker slows down to listen and look.
The opening stanza is the funniest. "Its nut reburied" implies a history: the squirrel has already moved this nut at least once. Then comes the delicious mind-reading of "pretends to forage." Nothing in a squirrel's behavior says "pretend," so the word is the speaker's own, a joke about wildlife that seems to have a guilty conscience. The second stanza turns the humor on the speaker. The turkeys split in a tidy half-and-half, one way and the other, and the speaker, caught between, can only "turn in circles." The flat, orderly statement about the birds gives way to a short, dizzy line about the human. It is a small portrait of bewilderment, and it quietly anticipates the disorientation of a lost hour.
The third stanza is the only one that names the human calendar, and the phrase "we have to set" makes the time change sound like a chore. The line break leaves "set" hanging, then drops us onto "the clocks ahead." Against that bureaucratic duty the poem places "the rustle of earthworms," a sound so faint that hearing it demands stillness. The worms obey no clock, and the stanza suggests that real spring is detected by listening, not scheduled.
In the fourth stanza the speaker becomes "we," and the search begins: "We search the sky / for the whistling woodcock." The whistle, the *w* sounds and the upturned gaze build real expectation. Judging by the imagery, the watchers are hoping for a seasonal ritual, a bird to confirm that spring has begun. What they get is "Nothing but the moon." The line is a wry deflation, but it is also a quiet correction, since the moon is hardly nothing. The disappointment and the reward arrive in the same breath.
The final stanza moves indoors and into morning. "In the bathtub this morning, / it's the first wolf spider / of spring!" is the poem's only exclamation mark, and its only real payoff. After the squirrel's evasions, the turkeys' scatter and the woodcock's no-show, spring finally turns up, in the least glamorous spot imaginable. The exclamation could be delight or alarm, and the poem lets both readings stand. The phrasing sounds like a naturalist's tally, but it also sounds like someone surprised at the tub.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal of the greeting-card spring. The speaker is outwitted by a squirrel, left spinning by turkeys and denied a woodcock, and that humility is the point. Clocks can be changed in a minute, but a season can only be noticed, and noticing, the poem suggests, is a practice of patience, humor and willingness to be a little foolish. Bonta gives us spring as a series of small encounters, and he trusts them to be enough.