Courtship is the joke at the start of this poem, and survival is the serious point waiting at the end. Dave Bonta looks at a small woodland wildflower, the spring beauty, and describes it as a flirt: "Prim pink pinstripes / beckon from the wet soil / beside the creek." The Latin name under the title promises a botanical note, and the poem does keep that promise. Its details about a flower that opens and closes in a set order, shuts up in poor weather, and slips back into the grass are the kind a careful observer would collect. Then it dresses those facts in human behaviour.
The turn comes at the first "But." After the flowers "beckon," we expect an invitation. Instead we get a stereotype of the fussy beauty who is "choosy / about their suitors." The phrase "most beauties" is a gentle dig at the stereotype, and it makes the flowers sound like people at a party. The repeated "just" in "unmoved except by just / the right bee visiting / in just the right order" gives the choosiness a prim, particular voice. The "right order" also describes the plant's real timetable. One day the stamens come out, and "the next, it's the pistel's turn," spelled as the poem has it. Bonta turns this into turn-taking in a dance, since "hokey- / poke their stamens out" echoes the children's song, with its in-and-out routine. The line break after "hokey-" is itself a small comic pause, and the reader has to wait a beat for the rhyme-like second half of the word.
The form helps the humour. The poem is a single block of eighteen short lines with no end rhyme and no fixed metre, so it reads like quiet, slightly amused speech. Enjambment keeps the sentences moving down the page in small steps: "But like / most beauties," and "Who wouldn't be wary / with such a large / & edible heart?" The only line that fully stops is the deadpan "Petals close even for a cloud." Its flat, complete statement fits the idea of a flower that shuts at the first hint of trouble. The sound patterns are light but deliberate. The opening has a cluster of p's in "Prim pink pinstripes," which sounds neat and fastidious. "Choosy" and "suitors" share a hissing, whispering sound, and "pass for grass" is the poem's tightest rhyme. That rhyme comes at the point where the flower is hiding, as if the words were blending into the background too.
That hiding is the poem's second movement. Once "flowering's done," the plant "do[es] their best / to pass for grass." The wording is almost shy, like someone trying not to be noticed after being on show. Camouflage is a kind of modesty, and it prepares the closing question. Everything before it, the fussy bee-picking and the shutting petals, could be read as vanity. The last three lines reverse that reading. "Who wouldn't be wary / with such a large / & edible heart?" If the heart is, as the poem implies, the plant's underground food store, then being picky is a sensible defence against being eaten. The ampersand makes the line look casual and a little hurried, and it undercuts the lyrical phrase "edible heart" with an offhand note. "Heart" also keeps its ordinary emotional meaning. The flower is guarded the way anyone with something valuable and easily hurt would be.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It makes no grand claim about nature. It takes the old habit of describing flowers as coy beauties and tests it against what the plant actually does, and the habit holds up better than we might expect. The coyness turns out to be strategy. By the end, the comparison between human courtship and plant behaviour is a way of seeing the flower more clearly, and the reader may also see something about shyness and self-protection in people. The wit stays affectionate, and the poem comes across as a close look at a small thing that is clever and a little vulnerable.