Dave Bonta's "Retirement" is a short, bare poem about what is left when work ends. The opening image of people passing "through stone / asking for things to touch" suggests a search for something solid and real, as if the speaker's days now lack anything to hold on to. Even the line "our work is on the wing" feels unsettled: work is no longer something fixed but something that has flown off, out of reach.
The middle of the poem turns darker. The "hole inside" is compared to a tomb "opened after years of faith," which suggests an emptiness found where something meaningful was expected. Judging by the imagery, the speaker's long commitment to work may have left nothing behind but silence.
The poem ends on a plain, almost whispered plea: "let me not grow old." The mood is quiet, bleak and exposed. Retirement here isn't a gentle rest but a confrontation with loss and mortality, and the final line sounds like a prayer from someone with little else to say.