How do you miss something you have never known? Dave Bonta's eight-line poem begins inside that puzzle: "The sea I miss / I know not." The title calls the sea "unknown," yet the speaker feels its absence. The poem is about longing with no clear object, a homesickness for a place or a state of being that the speaker cannot picture. Its central idea is that when we reach for something this vague, we may find only ourselves, and not in a comforting way.
The speaker says he knows nothing of this sea, then fills the next four lines with specific things. This is the poem's most interesting trick. A colon follows "I know not," and we expect a blank. We get a list: "the otherwise things, / the way of ice, / all the bells and bonfires, / the land at night." The "unknown" sea is clearly imagined in some detail. The strangest phrase is "the otherwise things." "Otherwise" normally modifies a verb, but here it works as an adjective, as if the sea held a whole category of things that are simply other, unlike anything in the speaker's present life. "The way of ice" turns a sea into something that freezes, slows and stops. "Way" can mean a path or a manner, so ice seems to have its own method of being. The sea here is not blue and welcoming, and the longing is not for ordinary holiday scenery.
The next two items bring in people. Bells and bonfires suggest signals and celebrations. Judging by the imagery, the bells might belong to ships or buoys, and the fires might be lit on a shore, but the poem never says. The alliteration of "bells and bonfires" gives the line a ringing, almost festive sound, a rare moment of warmth. Then comes "the land at night," which reverses our usual viewpoint. We see the land from the water, as something dark and distant, perhaps dotted with lights. The speaker misses the sea, yet the last image of the list looks back at the shore he is presumably standing on, or imagining beyond.
Then the poem turns. A second colon follows "I do not see much," and it promises another list. This time it delivers almost nothing: "only an indifferent heart." The two colons mirror each other, and the second cancels the first. The longing the list built up collapses into a single flat phrase. The word "indifferent" is ambiguous. It could describe the speaker's own heart, numb and unable to feel what it thinks it ought to. It could also describe the sea's heart, the old idea of nature as uncaring. There is also a pun hidden in the word. The list was full of "otherwise" things, things that are different, and the poem ends on "in-different," the very opposite. The speaker wants difference and finds sameness.
The form supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, and the lines are short, mostly three to six syllables. The final line is the longest, so the poem ends heavily after a run of light, clipped fragments. The grammar of "I know not" is old-fashioned, with the verb after the negative, which gives the opening a slightly solemn tone. Against that, the plain "I do not see much" sounds modern and tired. The pronoun "I" appears three times in eight lines, yet the speaker shrinks as the poem goes on, from a person who misses a whole sea to a person who sees "only" a heart.
The poem is worth reading for how much it holds in so little space. It does not describe the sea at length, and that restraint is the point. A longing this undefined cannot be satisfied by description, and the reader is left to supply their own bells, ice and dark shoreline. It also tells an uncomfortable truth about desire. Sometimes we do not miss a particular thing but the feeling of missing, and when we look inward to find the cause, the answer is blank. A poem that admits this, and ends on an empty note instead of a consoling one, feels honest.