Seven short lines, and the first one turns a body part into an argument. "No purse, the ear / will know / what to do." A purse is for keeping: coins, keys, small things you can't afford to lose. The ear has no such pouch. It can't clasp or hoard. Hearing the word as a verb adds another layer, since to purse your lips is to tighten them, and the ear, unlike the mouth, has nothing to tighten. It stays open. There may also be a faint echo of the old saying about a silk purse and a sow's ear, though the poem never leans on it.
The title, "Listen", is a command, and the poem's central idea seems to be that attention can handle grief without gripping it. The ear "will know / what to do," but the poem doesn't say what that is. The knowledge is trusted rather than explained, and the withheld answer is part of the point. Instructions about how to grieve usually sound false. Bonta simply gives the ear credit for knowing.
The second sentence moves from the body to open water. "Sometimes at sea" works twice: literally on the ocean, and in the idiom for being lost and bewildered. The poem lets both meanings sit together, so the sea is both a place and a state of mind. Then comes "a great loss," and the poem refuses to say what was lost. No death, no name, no cause. That blank is what lets any reader fill it in with their own. The small word "would" is careful too. It isn't "will" or "does." It suggests something that has happened before, or might, rather than a promise. Together with "Sometimes," it keeps the consolation honest, so the poem never claims that loss always leaves, only that it can.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter here, but the shape of the lines still matters. Counted by syllables, they run roughly four, two, three, four, three, then seven and six. The opening is clipped, almost like a set of instructions, with "will know" standing alone as a short, steady line. Then the lines stretch out. "Would go away on the wind" is the longest, and you have to say it in one breath, as if the line itself were being carried off. The break after "a great loss" does something similar: the loss is gone at the end of the line, before the next line says where it went.
The sound supports this. The long o of "know" is picked up by "go," so knowing and leaving are tied together by the ear before the mind notices. Soft s sounds run through "purse," "Sometimes," "sea," "loss," and "things," a low hush that suits a poem about quiet. The last word, "things," is plain and unpoetic, and that is right. The loss doesn't vanish into a grand abstraction like silence or eternity. It disperses into "the quiet of things," the ordinary stillness of objects and weather. The phrase is also a small paradox, because quiet is something you can only hear by listening, so the poem ends where its title began.
The vocabulary shifts quietly as well. "Purse" and "loss" both belong to the language of accounts and ledgers, of what you hold and what you've been short-changed of. By the end, the poem has moved to the language of weather and water: wind, sea, quiet. In that move it suggests that loss need not be tallied or stored. It can be heard and allowed to pass.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is tiny, yet it does what it recommends. It doesn't argue or console at length, and it leaves a lot of space around its few words. A reader finishing the last line is already in the quiet it describes, and "Listen" has become something done rather than something ordered. A poem about letting go that holds so lightly to its own words is a fitting piece of evidence for its idea.