Five lines, two sentences, and a death held back until the final two lines: Dave Bonta's "Sound of the Sea" is built like a held breath, released only at the end. On a first reading it seems to be about a sleepless brother who happens to be the sea. The last sentence changes that. We learn that this brother, whoever or whatever he is, has lost his only child, and that the loss happened "last night at home." The poem is about recognising grief by its sound before anyone has said what has happened.
The opening depends on a small piece of syntax. "My brother the sea" is a bare apposition, with no "is like" or "as." The sea is simply claimed as kin. The sentence then makes us wait. The thing being found, "my brother the sea," comes first, then the description "who lay so late awake," and only in line three do we get the verb: "I find by his voice." This word order mimics the experience it describes. Someone lies in the dark, hears a sound, and works out who it belongs to. The title does the same job. "Sound of the Sea" is where the speaker's attention starts, and the poem moves from that sound to a person.
The poem is also full of echoes. "Lay," "late" and "awake" share a long *a*, so the sleeplessness seems to drag on from word to word. The second half is held together by a chain of long *i* sounds: "find," "by," "child," "died," "night." Reading aloud, you can hear the voice of line three coming back inside the death of lines four and five. The soft *s* and *z* sounds in "sea," "so," "his," "voice" and "his" give the first sentence a hushing, wave-like surface. Then the poem ends on "home," a word that closes the mouth on a long *m*, almost a hum. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short, somewhere between four and six syllables, and each holds two or three stresses. The quiet sound-patterning does the work that rhyme might do elsewhere.
The most interesting word may be "lay." It suggests a body in bed, but it also describes the sea lying flat and heavy at night. "Late" is similarly double. It means the hour, but after the final sentence it can't help sounding like "the late," the vocabulary of the dead. The poem never says that this is the intended reading, and I'd treat it as an effect of the language rather than a certainty. Even so, the phrase "so late awake" carries more weight on a second reading than it did on the first.
The ending is a flat, factual announcement, and that flatness is the point. Everything before it is metaphor, while "His only child died / last night at home" is plain statement. No adjective tells us how to feel. "Only" does the heaviest work in the poem, since it means nothing is left to share the loss with. "At home" is the quietest phrase, and perhaps the saddest. It suggests a death in an ordinary place, among ordinary furniture, rather than somewhere official and distant. Notice also what the poem leaves out. We are told that the brother has a voice, but never what that voice says. Perhaps it speaks no words, only sound, like the sea.
This is where the poem's significance lies. Its central metaphor is not decoration. The sea works as an image because grief, like the sea, is large, continuous and not made of language. Calling the brother "the sea" lets the poem suggest a sorrow too big to be put into sentences, and it lets the speaker take part in that sorrow by listening rather than explaining. Nothing in the text tells us whether the brother is a real sibling or the sea personified, and the poem doesn't need us to decide. The effect is the same either way: one person hears another's pain through a wall of darkness and knows exactly who it is.
For a poem this short, that is a lot to leave in a reader's head. Its lesson is about restraint. Say less, put the hardest fact last, and let a single sound carry the rest.