Most love poems promise melting hearts and fluttering stomachs. Dave Bonta's twelve-line poem promises the opposite: when the woman he loves smiles, the speaker bristles and freezes. The whole poem is one long comparison, held back until the last moment. For eleven lines we watch caterpillars, and only in the final four, after a colon, do we learn what they have to do with a person: "that's what happens / to me whenever / she smiles."
The title and subtitle give a frame. "What he said to his friend" makes us eavesdroppers on a private confession, and "in the style of the classical Tamil" points to an older tradition. Classical Tamil love poetry is generally known for drawing its comparisons from the natural world and for speakers who confide in a companion. I can't say which poems Bonta had in mind, so I'll stick to what the text shows. The witch hazel, a shrub of northern woodlands, suggests that the landscape has moved far from South India. The borrowed method stays the same: understand a feeling by looking hard at a small piece of nature.
That looking is where the poem's power lies. The caterpillars are "yellownecked," a single compound word that sounds like a field guide. They sit "on the underside of a witch hazel leaf," a hidden, sheltered place, and the detail makes them seem vulnerable before any danger arrives. The language of observation is cool and exact: "responding to the approach of danger." Then the poem tips into metaphor. The caterpillars arch their "soft bodies" and freeze "into a clump / of sudden thorns." The contrast between "soft" and "thorns" is the poem's central idea. The creatures are not really prickly; they only look it. Their defence is a bluff, and it is also a kind of shyness. If the speaker stiffens when she smiles, the stiffness protects something tender.
The most unsettling word is "caress." We expect the danger to be a bite or a sting, but the poem has the wasp's antennae touch the caterpillars, and a touch like that is also what a lover does. So the smile is both threat and tenderness, and the caterpillars "hope" to "ward off" something they may not entirely want to escape. That small ambiguity keeps the poem from being only a joke about shyness. It suggests how frightening it can be to be noticed by someone who matters.
There is humour too. The comparison is elaborate and scientific, and what it describes is a man turning awkward at a smile. The gap between grand machinery and tiny cause gives the poem its self-mockery. The speaker doesn't call himself brave or romantic. He compares himself to a knot of insects playing dead.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, so the poem sounds like speech, like a man talking to a friend. The line lengths do quiet work, though. The middle lines stretch to nine syllables ("on the underside of a witch hazel leaf"), as if the speaker is warming to his observation, and then they shrink: "that's what happens" and "to me whenever" have four syllables each, and "she smiles" has three. The poem itself contracts as it reaches the woman, curling up like the caterpillars. The ampersand in "& freezing" gives a slightly hurried, handwritten feel, and the hard consonants of "clump" and "thorns" make the lines themselves feel stiff. The poem is also a single sentence that doesn't stop until "smiles," which holds the reader in suspense much as the caterpillars are held.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it reverses a cliché. By describing attraction as a defensive reflex, it makes the emotion feel truer and more surprising than any talk of fluttering hearts could, and it does so in twelve short lines.