Five short lines, no punctuation, not a capital letter anywhere: Dave Bonta's "Growth" looks almost too slight to hold what it carries. It is a single sentence, and its logic only becomes clear when you notice how many of its words work two ways at once.
The opening line is quietly odd. "Having lain long in bed" ought to describe the speaker, but the next words are "my sorrow," so grammatically it is the sorrow that has been lying there. That small slip makes grief feel like a presence in the room, something that has taken to its bed and stayed. Perhaps the speaker is lying there too, since the poem doesn't say. "Bed" also has other meanings. A stone can lie in a riverbed, and a seed can lie in a flowerbed. Given the title, "Growth," both readings seem to be in play, and I'd say that is deliberate: whatever happens here happens slowly, in a place where things settle and get left alone.
Then comes the central metaphor, "my sorrow is a stone." It is blunt and monosyllabic, and nothing in the poem softens it. The surprise is where the stone ends up: "in the book of prodigies." A prodigy here probably isn't a gifted child. The older sense of the word is a marvel or an omen, a strange event worth recording. So the sorrow is not only heavy but remarkable, entered into a kind of catalogue of wonders. The poem seems to be turning private misery into something worth noting, almost with pride.
The last two lines explain how the book was made: "ingeniously writ by water / in a storm of hail." The word "ingeniously" brings a dry, admiring tone. Someone, or something, has been clever here, and the cleverness is oddly cruel and beautiful at once. Water is the least permanent writing material there is, and the phrase "writ by water" echoes the familiar idea of something written in water, meaning something that vanishes. Yet the sorrow being written down is a stone. Hail resolves the contradiction, because hail is water that has turned hard. Hailstones also grow by gathering layer upon layer of ice as they are tossed around inside a storm. Read this way, the title stops being ironic and becomes literal. The sorrow doesn't pass or dissolve. It accumulates, ring by ring, until it is solid enough to fall.
The sound of the poem supports this. The lines are short and uneven: six syllables, six, seven, then eight in the long fourth line, "ingeniously writ by water," and finally a clipped five. The fourth line is the poem's widest point, rolling out its four-syllable adverb and its soft w-sounds, before the last line closes on the hard, single-beat word "hail." Without punctuation, the voice has no place to pause, so it has to run from bed to stone to book to storm in one breath and stop only where the words run out. There is no end rhyme, but there are echoes. "Lain" in the first line and "hail" in the last share the same long vowel, so the poem begins and ends on the same sound. "Sorrow," "stone" and "storm" all begin with the same hissing sound, and that helps link the grief to the weather that gives it form.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it explains. It never says who or what the speaker has lost, and nothing in the text allows us to guess. Instead it offers an image of grief as something geological and meteorological, formed by forces larger than the person who feels it. That is both bleak and strangely consoling. If sorrow is a stone in a book of marvels, then it is not a failing or a stain. It is part of how the world records its own extraordinary weather. The poem also refuses the usual comfort that grief melts or fades. It suggests instead that grief grows, and that something hard and lasting can be made out of something as fluid as water.