A video call is interrupted by a second call, and a piece of software announces that someone has been "Held remotely." Dave Bonta builds a short poem from this small, slightly comic moment. The speaker has put "you" on hold to answer another caller, and what begins as a minor rudeness becomes a meditation on what it means to be with someone when an ocean lies between you. The central idea is that closeness is not a matter of touch or distance but of attention, shared moment by moment.
The poem runs on the word "hold," which changes meaning each time it returns. In the opening line, "Held remotely" is cold technical language, the wording of a phone system. By the third stanza it has become physical. The person on the other end laughs and says they "almost miss being held," and the word now suggests an embrace. The last two words, "we hold," change it once more. The verb is no longer passive and has found its subject. Being held by a machine has become two people holding on, holding the line, and holding together. The title, "On Hold," carries all of these meanings at once.
The form is plain. There are four tercets and no rhyme, and the voice sounds like someone talking rather than someone performing. The gentle line breaks leave small pauses: "when I interrupt our call / to take another" enacts the interruption it describes, with the second call literally taking up the next line. The vocabulary mixes registers. Machine words like "screen," "message," "call" and "Resume" sit beside older, more physical words like "reaches," "grasp" and "held." That contrast is the poem's real tension, between a world of interfaces and the human body that still wants to be touched.
The second stanza turns on a familiar echo. Saying that the world's "far reaches / no longer exceed our grasp" recalls Browning's well-known line that a person's reach should exceed their grasp. Here the old aspiration has been flattened, since technology has put the far side of the world within reach. But "grasp" is a word for hands, and the poem knows that being reachable is not the same as being held. The stanza's opening, "Talking or holding: you can't do both," sets this up as a flat rule, with a colon that works like a small logical proof.
The final stanza answers that rule with another colon. It begins with "Five hours apart," a plain fact about time zones, then makes a paradox of it: "yet we share a single present." The sentence stretches across three lines, and the break after "infinitesimal" delays the word "moment" so that the instant seems to lengthen. The listing of "speaking, listening" then moves forward in small steps, "from one infinitesimal / moment to the next," as if the connection had to be renewed continuously. The poem ends on a short, firm clause after that long breath. The two earlier verbs, talking and holding, which could not be done together, have merged. Talking and listening are the holding.
There is some quiet humor in how this arrives. The speaker reads "Resume" on his own screen, an interface button that doubles as an emotional instruction, and the "you" laughs rather than complaining. The tone stays light, so the ending lands as a discovery rather than a lecture. Even the relationship between the two people is left open. We know only that they are close enough for one to miss the other's embrace.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it gets from an ordinary glitch. It takes the language of modern communication, which is usually invisible, and listens to it closely enough to hear a pun and then a truth. It does not mourn technology or celebrate it. It suggests that presence has always depended on attention, and that a connection across the ocean lasts only as long as both people keep choosing to stay on the line.