Seven short lines, two sentences, and a whole year slips away inside them. Dave Bonta's "Peace time" begins with a loss, "A whole year goes / to the war with sand", and ends by stepping into something as small and odd as "an hour's ear." Between those points the poem moves from a battle that cannot be won to a handful of ordinary pleasures that may be the only peace on offer.
The first sentence is the strangest. A year "goes to" a war, as if it had been drafted. But wars usually have enemies with names and flags, and this one is fought "with sand." Sand has no front line. It runs through fingers, fills shoes and buries things, and it also trickles through an hourglass. The poem never says what the war is, but the imagery suggests a struggle against something shapeless and endless, perhaps time itself. The line break helps. "Goes" ends its line, so for a moment we simply read that a year passes, and only then does "to the war" tell us where it went. The title sharpens the puzzle. "Peace time" can mean an era without fighting, yet here the fighting continues inside it. Split into two words, it also reads as peace measured in time, and time as what we spend to get it.
The second sentence changes the temperature. "We" arrives, and with it memory: "We remember one another." The object is each other, not an event, so what is kept is people rather than history. The activities that follow are small and childlike: "going to play house / and walk in the fields, / eat cheese-cake." Playing house is domestic life in miniature, and walking in fields and eating cake need no purpose. Even the hyphen in "cheese-cake" gives the word a homely, old-fashioned look on the page. Against the abstraction of the first sentence, these things are concrete. The grammar also stays slippery. "Going to play house" could be a plain memory or something half-dreamed, and the poem doesn't settle which.
Then comes the final verb. After "play," "walk" and "eat," the list ends on "enter," and the object is not a place but "an hour's ear." The leap is deliberate. An hour is a unit of time and an ear is for listening, so to enter an hour's ear might mean to move inside a stretch of time and attend to it instead of fighting it. In the first sentence time is an enemy. In the last line it is something you can step into, like the house in "play house." The sounds support this link, since "house" and "hour's" share the same vowel, so the game-house and the hour are sound-cousins. There is a quieter echo too: take the first letter from "year" and you have "ear." Whether or not it was planned, the effect is that a year's worth of loss is reduced, by the final line, to a small organ of listening.
The form follows the same shrinking. The poem is free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, and its lines swell and then collapse. Counting syllables, they run roughly four, five, seven, five, five, six and finally three. The longest line, "We remember one another," is where memory opens up, and the shortest, "an hour's ear," closes the poem down to a point. The only full stops fall after "sand" and "ear," so the poem is really two breaths, one about loss and one about recovery. The sound shifts as well. The first sentence is full of hissing and w-sounds ("whole," "war," "with," "goes," "sand"), like grains pouring. The second softens into the long *e* of "remember," "cheese," "fields" and "ear."
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it claims with so little. It suggests that peace is not simply the absence of war but something rebuilt from shared small acts and from attention. It names no battlefield, no date and no person, so readers can fill the gap with their own year of struggle and their own hour of relief. The poem doesn't promise that the war with sand ends. It only shows that, inside a lost year, one hour can still be entered and listened to.