Dave Bonta's "Sea Levels" begins with a small, patient act: people at low tide combing peat for footprints. Everything that follows grows out of that gesture of looking down and finding the past still pressed into the ground. The poem measures time on two scales at once, the four thousand years since a forest stood where the tide now comes and goes, and the few hours of a day at the seaside. Underneath runs the uneasy sense that the water which swallowed that forest has not finished.
The form is spare. The poem is a string of short, unrhymed fragments divided by white space, and it reads more like a haiku sequence than a conventional poem, though it keeps no strict syllable count. Apart from the apostrophe in "gull's," there is no punctuation at all, so each image arrives bare and the reader supplies the connections. The stanzas mostly alternate between three lines and two, a back-and-forth pattern that feels a little like the tide. Line breaks are used for emphasis. "4000 years later" gets a whole line to itself, and the sentence about the stumps drops its punchline, "sprout bladderwrack," onto the next. A dead forest producing seaweed is the kind of reversal the poem likes.
The word choices are carefully matched to the scene. The early images are brown and earthy: peat, stumps, "scraps of root-bark." Then the palette changes with "all the colors of ice cream / against the Atlantic." "Against" works two ways. The pastel seafront is set beside the vast ocean, and it also seems to be leaning on it, or defending itself from it. Elsewhere the language turns eerie. The gull's cry "turns eldritch," an old and slightly spooky word for something uncanny, because a familiar holiday sound becomes strange once you remember you are standing in a drowned forest. "Undead stumps" continues the horror-story vocabulary. The stumps are neither alive nor dead, and the seaweed on them is a kind of life that belongs to a different world. The modest "our shared excitement / at scraps of root-bark" matters too. Huge spans of time are reached through something small enough to hold, and the word "shared" turns the searchers into a community.
The poem's most unsettling line is also its flattest: "the high street is already / lower than the beach." "High street" is a British phrase, so the diction suggests a British or Irish seaside town, though the poem never names one. The word to watch is "already." It pulls the future into the present, because the town is not threatened by flooding but already sits below the waterline.
Then comes "Tisha B'Av just past," a Jewish day of mourning for the destruction of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Orthodox families walk along the sea wall, so a people who remember an ancient catastrophe are strolling along a structure built to hold back a new one. The sea wall is both a barrier and a promenade, a place of leisure that exists only because of the threat. The poem sets one lost world, the forest, beside another, the Temple, and suggests that loss is something people have always had to live alongside.
The ending turns on a pun: "land marks us / sea levels us." Land leaves marks, such as footprints, roots, stumps and individual lives. "Levels" is both a verb meaning to flatten or equalise and an echo of the title's measurement. The land makes us distinct and the sea evens us out. The final stanza, "beneath the waves / we are saying hello / and goodbye," is deliberately open. The "we" could be the ancient people greeting the beachcombers, or the beachcombers addressing their own drowned future. The present tense "are saying" lets both happen at once.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. It deals with rising seas without statistics or sermons, and it relies on things that can be seen and handled: peat, bark, a wall, the colors of ice cream. The speaker's "we" widens as the poem goes on, from a few people on a beach to everyone. The tone stays calm and curious, even tender, and that calm is what makes the poem's warning land.