A sailor comes home, and the poem gives him eight short lines to say what that means. Oddly, five of them are spent on the sea. What they describe is a lavish kind of emptiness, and that is where the poem's main idea lies: the voyage offered every kind of surplus except the things that might ground a life, while home offers something much smaller and much more bodily.
Look at the opening: "I had at sea / an abundance of sea." The phrase chases its own tail. What the sea supplied in abundance was more sea. "Abundance" promises wealth, but the only thing in excess is the very thing he was surrounded by. Then comes the cargo of old adventure stories, "spice and gold," followed by the dry, almost bookkeeping phrase "in lieu of god." "In lieu of" means "instead of," so the sailor presents a trade: treasure took the place of faith. On the page, "gold" and "god" are nearly the same word, one letter apart, and the poem sets them side by side as if the substitution were that easy. The list ends with "the absence of time," the only item that is openly a lack. Every line is grammatically something he *had*, yet half of it is subtraction.
The turn arrives with "At home, I sleep." The tense shifts from past to present, and the swollen noun phrases give way to a plain verb in a short line. Sleep is itself a kind of absence of time, so home seems at first to continue the sea's timelessness in miniature. Then the last two lines bring time back. Mending is slow, repetitive work, and the breeches presumably carry the wear of the voyage. The sailor does nothing here while "the wench" works beside him. The word is old-fashioned and a little dismissive, and the poem never says whether she is wife, lover or servant. Words like "wench," "breeches" and "in lieu of" belong to the diction of an old sea yarn, so the voice may be partly performed, and the reader is left to wonder how far to trust this man's account of himself.
The poem is free verse with no end rhyme, and its lines are very short, running from about three to seven syllables. Without rhyme, the sound patterns do the quiet work. "Sea" appears at the end of lines one and two, a rhyme of a word with itself, and its vowel returns in "sleep," as if the sea had followed him ashore. The soft hiss of "sea," "spice," "absence" and "sleep" threads through the poem. The last lines pull tighter: "mending my breeches / by my bed" is knitted together by the repeated m and b sounds, which makes the ending feel snug. The possessives matter too. At sea he *had* things, but nothing was "my." Ownership appears only at home and shrinks to the scale of "my breeches" and "my bed." The poem ends on "bed," a flat, one-syllable word that lands with a thud instead of a flourish.
The title recalls Robert Louis Stevenson's "Requiem," which contains the line "Home is the sailor, home from sea," a verse about death as a homecoming. If the echo is intended, Bonta's home is quieter and less final: sleep rather than death, though the two sit close together. Even without the echo, the title promises a welcome that the poem then deflates. There is no reunion scene and no story of the voyage, only a sleeper and a needle.
The poem is worth reading closely because it refuses to say whether this is a happy ending. The sea's "abundance" was hollow, and the sailor seems to know it, so a mended pair of breeches may be exactly the kind of modest, real thing he lacked. But sleep can be peace or retreat, and being waited on can be comfort or a sign of how little he gives back. In so few words, the poem shows how a grand adventure can shrink in the telling to a domestic scene, and leaves us to decide whether that is a loss or a relief.