Dave Bonta's "Garden" treats a garden as a map that keeps changing, a place where small close-up scenes open into bigger thoughts. An ichneumon (a parasitic wasp) hunts its prey, a bumblebee circles a coneflower like a clock hand, and poppy pods look like empty thought-balloons. The speaker's attention is playful and curious, drifting from one image to the next, and it sometimes turns dark. The Aztec lines, where a heart is a flower and a dagger a hummingbird's beak, end with a dry warning: "A bad metaphor can be fatal."
The speaker also admits to preferring words and ideas over the actual flowers, which makes the garden partly a place of imagination. That prepares the ending, where the children, tired of lawns, streets and being watched, find a "blank spot" on the map and never come home. The mood is wondering and a little eerie. The garden seems to offer freedom, but the poem leaves it unclear whether that freedom is a gift or a loss.