Reinvention usually sounds like a makeover: a new city, a new haircut, a new you. Dave Bonta's six-line poem offers no such comfort. It begins with hatred, moves through a field of corn and a burst of singing, and ends by calling the whole business arson. Becoming someone else, the poem suggests, is neither tidy nor gentle.
The opening stanza is two questions with no question marks and no capital letters: "who do I hate / who do I grow into". Without punctuation they read less like questions put to a listener and more like thoughts surfacing in the speaker's head, unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. The repeated "who do I" puts "hate" and "grow into" in the same grammatical slot, so the two begin to look like answers to each other. Perhaps we grow into the people we despise. Perhaps we grow by pushing against them. Perhaps the person hated is the speaker's own earlier self. The poem doesn't choose, and the word "who" rather than "what" keeps the question personal.
The second stanza turns to nature, and its syntax is cleverly unstable. "like corn in the sun" can attach to the question before it (how do I grow into someone? the way corn grows, upward and without much say in the matter) or to the line after it (like corn in the sun, I make canticles). Because of the line break, the simile hangs between both. Growth is something that happens to the speaker, yet "I make" is active, a deliberate act of creation. A canticle is a song of praise, a word from worship, so the speaker who has just mentioned hatred now produces something close to a hymn. Hate and praise sit a few lines apart, and the poem doesn't explain how they connect. Their sounds do the connecting. "Hate" and "make" share a long vowel, and the stanza's hard *k* sounds ("corn," "make," "canticles") give it a crisp, almost percussive edge. There is no true rhyme anywhere in the poem, so these faint echoes carry much of its music.
The final stanza gathers everything up: "and that must be the arson / of the self". "That" points back at the hatred, the growing and the singing all at once. "Must be" sounds like someone reasoning aloud and arriving reluctantly at a conclusion. "Arson" is a pointed choice. It means deliberate burning, a crime with a culprit, and it makes reinvention sound like a destructive act. The word also connects to the image before it. The sun that feeds the corn is a kind of fire, so the warm, pastoral middle of the poem quietly prepares for the burning at the end. The self is both the property destroyed and, judging by "the arson of the self," the one who sets the match. The poem never mentions what rises afterwards. It stops at the flames, so the reader must decide whether this fire is vandalism or the clearing of a field for new growth.
The shape of the poem supports this unsettled tone. It falls into three couplets, and the lines are short, mostly four or five syllables. The exception is "and that must be the arson," which at seven syllables is the longest line, as if the poem were gathering speed. It then drops to the three syllables of "of the self," the shortest line. The enjambment leaves "self" alone at the end of the poem, as though everything else had burned away around it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves to the reader. It compresses a large question about change into about twenty words, and it refuses to say whether change is good. Hatred, growth, song and destruction are laid side by side with no explanation, and readers have to supply the logic between the stanzas. That gap is where the poem becomes personal, because anyone who has tried to remake themselves has to ask who they were pushing against, and what they were willing to burn.