Dave Bonta begins with small, abandoned things in a forest: a chair gone soft with moss, a bedspring full of dead leaves, old stone walls that have tumbled into jumbles. Nature is slowly taking over what people left behind, and the speaker watches this with quiet, dry amusement. A deer eats the blackberry canes, spines and all, and steps through the rusty coils without fuss.
Then the poem looks up. A scarlet tanager sings, pausing to groom itself, and the speaker imagines the lice living ordinary lives in its feathers. They can't see the bird as we do, as a "glimmering jewel." The joke carries a gentle point: beauty depends on where you stand. The title, "Spaceship Earth," suggests we are like those lice, tiny passengers on something larger who rarely see the whole. The mood is wry, observant and tender, mixing humor with wonder at a world that looks like a "void" until you notice its brilliance.