For most of its length, Nathaniel S. Rounds's poem sounds like someone trying to be decent. A speaker apologises to a "you" because "our youngest, cruellest child" scratched that person's eye last November, and the eye has been scabbing and weeping ever since. Then comes a small mercy: after treatment, the injured person could still spot a bald eagle at the corner of Middle Dyke and Bains. A flat "However," follows, and then the verdict: "Your eyesight is still wanting." The last two lines deliver the jolt. "I was that bald eagle / At the corner of Middle Dyke and Bains." What began as regret about a child's cruelty ends with the speaker making a strange claim about himself or herself.
The form makes this turn easy to miss. There is no rhyme and no regular beat. The sentences are plain and conversational, closer to a note left on a table than to song, and the line breaks do the shaping. "And that ever since then" sits alone as a stanza, a trailing afterthought that lets the months of irritation stretch out. "However," is also stranded on its own line, so the reader waits for the bad news the way one waits for a doctor to turn a page. The poem's longest sentence, about the eye's anger, is followed at once by the short, almost dismissive "By scabbing and weeping." The rhythm moves from the careful to the blunt.
The diction is worth slowing down for. "Perennial" is a gardener's word, describing plants that return every year, and it fits an eye that flares up again and again. It also gives the injury an odd dignity. The eye "likes to declare" its anger, as if it were a small government issuing statements, and the verb turns a symptom into a grievance. Then "scabbing and weeping" brings us back to the body, with the hard sounds of the first word giving way to the soft vowel of the second. The child is "youngest, cruellest," two superlatives stacked together, and the speaker never defends the child. The apology is made on "our" behalf, which suggests a shared responsibility, and the poem never explains what that responsibility costs.
The eagle is the poem's one wild image, and it arrives disguised by an address. "Middle Dyke and Bains" sounds like a real intersection, and that deadpan precision makes the final line more unsettling. Why would the speaker be an eagle? Judging by the imagery, the bird carries two associations the poem lets collide. Eagles are famous for sharp eyesight, and they have talons. The addressee's sight is "wanting," a word that means both lacking and desiring. Perhaps she saw the eagle but did not recognise who it was, or perhaps she saw something the speaker wished she could not. The speaker may be admitting to a presence that watched, that was seen and not understood, or that harms the way the "cruellest child" did. The poem does not choose between these readings, and the repeated address line works differently the second time. The first time it is a place where something good was seen. The second time it is a place where someone was hiding in plain sight.
The title, "Do Not Place Saw on Stretcher," reads like a safety instruction, and the poem never mentions a saw or a stretcher. A stretcher could carry the injured, or it could be the frame on which a canvas is pulled tight. Either way, the title warns against putting something sharp where something vulnerable lies, and the poem is full of that tension: a child's scratch, a damaged eye, an eagle's gaze. It also sets up the clinical, bureaucratic tone that makes the final revelation stranger.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. In about a dozen short lines, it moves from apology to gratitude to criticism to a confession that rewrites everything before it. It shows how repeating one line can change its meaning, and how a speaker who sounds trustworthy can quietly become unreliable. It also leaves a question for the reader: who is really responsible for the injury, and what does it mean to be seen, or not seen, by the person you have hurt?