Six short lines, two comparisons, one capital letter. Dave Bonta's "Timeless" sets an alder beside a river and turns them into an old man and a child. The old man is asleep and the child is asking questions, and nobody answers.
The first stanza is all stillness. The alder is "like an old man / with a grey beard / sleeping in the sun." Judging by the image, the grey beard might be lichen, bare twigs or pale bark, but the poem doesn't say, and it doesn't need to. What matters is the feeling of warm, unbothered rest. Even the grammar is at rest: "sleeping" is a participle, a verb that has stopped going anywhere. The sentence has no main action at all, only a state. The old man has nothing left to prove and nothing to ask.
The second stanza changes mood almost at once. The river is "like a child / that must find some other / way to Why." Where the tree simply is, the river *must*. That one verb brings in need and pressure. A river is always in motion, and the poem reads that motion as a child's restless curiosity. The phrase "some other" is the most interesting detail. It suggests the obvious routes have already failed, perhaps because every earlier "why?" got a brush-off, or a sleepy silence. Since the old man next door is dozing, the child has to look elsewhere. The two stanzas can be read as a small family scene: grandfather napping in the sun, grandchild wandering off with a question.
The poem's most striking move is its last word. "Why" is capitalised, the only capital in a poem otherwise in lowercase, with no punctuation at all. Because of that, "Why" stops being a question and becomes a place, a destination on a map that the river is trying to reach. It is also a word children say constantly, and here it is named as a goal rather than asked as a question. The poem seems to suggest that wanting to know is a journey, and that the child may never arrive.
The construction supports this. The two stanzas run in parallel: a natural object, the word "like," a human figure, then a short description. This makes the contrast between them easy to see: age against youth, rest against need, a settled answer against an open question. The line lengths shift too. The first stanza runs at a calm, even pace, but the second ends on "way to Why," three syllables, two of them heavy stresses. After the enjambment at "some other," which makes us wait for the end of the thought, the poem stops short, almost like a door closing, or a child cut off. There is no rhyme, and the poem doesn't need it. Rhyme would suggest the neat resolution that the poem pointedly withholds.
That makes the title interesting. "Timeless" could describe the tree, which seems to sit outside the hurry of the day, napping in the sun. It could equally describe the river, which is always new water and yet always the same river. The word could even describe the pairing: there have always been old people who have stopped asking and children who haven't, and they have always shared the same landscape. Time here doesn't pass in a line. It sits side by side in two different ways of being alive.
The poem is significant for how much it carries in so little space. It is compact in the manner of a haiku, though it follows no fixed syllable count, and it relies on two well-chosen images instead of explanation. It never says that wisdom can fall asleep or that curiosity can't be put to bed, but a reader can feel both ideas. The last line is also open-ended in a way that stays with you. Is "Why" a place the river will finally reach, perhaps when it meets the sea? Or is the point that the journey itself is the answer? Bonta leaves the question running, which suits a poem about a river that has not stopped asking.