Most skyline pictures ask us to look up and feel pleasantly small. Dave Bonta's «New York Skyline» looks up and sees a clearing after the felling. In a handful of short lines it turns the city's famous silhouette into a dead forest, then a graveyard, then a source of poison in the air. It ends by wondering why anyone taught us to find the view uplifting. The central idea is the gap between how the skyline looks and what it does, and the last stanza makes that gap our responsibility: "we have learned" to admire it.
The poem runs on a simple, repeating mechanism. Each of the first three stanzas pairs a main line with a bracketed afterthought. The main lines read like fragments from a guidebook: "Forest / of glass stumps," "An over-crowded graveyard," "Scraping not sky but smog." None has a proper main verb, so the city is glimpsed rather than explained. The bracketed lines are quieter and more personal, like a second voice muttering under the first. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only short lines and the pauses of someone thinking aloud. The lack of music helps, because nothing is allowed to sound pretty. In the final stanza the brackets disappear, and the poem stops muttering and speaks outright.
The opening metaphor contradicts itself. A forest suggests life, but "stumps" means every tree has already been cut, and the glass towers are what remains. Then comes the strangest line: "(He was an epiphyte.)" An epiphyte is a plant, such as an orchid, that lives on another plant without roots in the ground, taking what it needs from air and rain. The poem never says who "he" is, so we have to infer. Perhaps he is a person who clung to the city the way such a plant clings to a trunk, and the past tense "was" suggests he is gone. The graveyard stanza follows naturally. Towers become headstones, and the shrugging "(Any damn stone will serve.)" implies that the dead, like the buildings, are interchangeable. The rough word "damn" is where human temper first breaks the surface.
The third stanza is the cleverest. "Skyscraper" is a word we no longer hear as a metaphor, and Bonta breaks it back into its parts. In "Scraping not sky but smog" the hissing s, sk and sm sounds rasp as the line goes. The parenthesis then delivers on the epiphyte image: "His dust taking root in a million lungs." The plant language returns, but now the dead man seeds the living, and lungs, with their branching passages, become a new forest. There are a million of them, as crowded as the trees that are gone.
Then the closing stanza: "Strange the sights / we have learned / to consider / inspiring." The inverted word order sounds like a sigh, and the line breaks make us take the sentence one step at a time. "Learned" implies something taught rather than natural. "Consider" is a deliberate judgment rather than a spontaneous feeling. And "we" pulls the reader into the accusation. The last word carries a pun the poem has been preparing. "Inspire" comes from a Latin root meaning "to breathe in," so after the smog and the million lungs, "inspiring" cannot be heard innocently. What inspires us, literally, is what we inhale.
The poem matters for how much it does with so little. It takes the most familiar image of urban grandeur and turns it into an image of death and pollution without raising its voice. The brackets, the broken-open word "skyscraper" and the breathing pun all work quietly. By ending on "we," the poem leaves the reader with a question about their own habits of admiration, and about what they have been trained not to notice.