There is not one crocus, robin or patch of melting snow in "Signs of Spring", yet the title insists the season has arrived. Dave Bonta offers only five scraps of public language, the kind we read without really reading: UNDER CONSTRUCTION, ONE WAY, NO STOPPING, MIND THE GAP, YIELD. The poem rests on a pun in its title. "Signs" can be omens in the natural world, the first hints that winter is loosening its grip, or they can be the painted, bolted-down notices of roads and railway platforms. By presenting the second kind and calling them the first, the poem asks us to read a season through the vocabulary of rules.
Each phrase works twice, once as a literal instruction and once as a comment on spring. UNDER CONSTRUCTION fits the sense that the world is being rebuilt after winter, a building site of buds and mud. It may also be a plain fact, since in places with hard winters, roadwork tends to arrive with the warm weather. ONE WAY suggests time's direction: the year turns and does not reverse. NO STOPPING reads as a prohibition on the season itself, as though growth were traffic that cannot be halted once it is moving.
MIND THE GAP is the oddest and most open of the five. Judging by the sequence, it could warn of the gap between thaw and green, the false starts and cold snaps that make early spring unreliable. It could also point to the distance between us and nature, since we are receiving spring secondhand, through signage. A sign meant to stop a traveller stumbling becomes a gentle caution about hope: watch your step as things begin.
The final word does the most work. YIELD means to give way, which is what a driver does at the junction and what winter does to spring. It also means to produce, as in the yield of a harvest, so that at the last moment the poem lets farming and fertility in. And it means to surrender, which turns the sign into advice to the reader: stop resisting the change. One word carries all three senses, and the poem stops there, leaving the meanings hanging.
The form is as spare as the content. There is no rhyme and no punctuation, only capital letters, the typography of authority, which also gives the poem a slightly shouted, insistent quality. The lines are short and tend to shrink, from the five syllables of UNDER CONSTRUCTION to the single syllable of YIELD. The rhythm moves from the walking pace of the first line to the two heavy beats of ONE WAY, then to the small lilt of MIND the GAP. Hard consonants, the p in STOPPING and GAP and the closing d of YIELD, make the lines feel clipped and braked. The last line gives us no further syllable to move on to.
The poem is also built as a quiet arc. It begins with a state (under construction), moves to direction and momentum, passes through a warning, and ends in submission. The signs shift from describing a situation to commanding the reader, so spring stops being a pleasant backdrop and becomes something that acts on us, with its own authority.
The poem is significant for how much it trusts the reader. It has almost nothing on the page, and the meaning appears only when we bring the title to the words and hear the second meaning in each one. It also sidesteps the familiar catalogue of blossoms and birdsong, finding the season in the most ordinary, overlooked text of daily life. After reading it, a walk past a roadworks sign may feel different, as if the town itself were writing a short, stern poem about the weather.