A holiday is meant to be a clean break, yet the speaker of Dave Bonta's "On holiday" never gets as far as the beach, the hotel or the view. The only place the poem names is the one being left behind. The title sets the scene, and then four short lines are spent not on where the speaker is but on what refuses to stay away.
The first couplet is blunt. "The office is a reproach / that I block out." The choice of "reproach" matters. Plenty of words describe a stressful workplace, such as pressure, deadline or burden. A reproach is something else: a look of disappointment, a silent accusation. The office is imagined as a face rather than a building, and the speaker's relationship to it is closer to guilt than to boredom. The poem never says what the speaker has failed at, or whether the guilt is about work left undone or about a life that work is crowding out. That silence lets readers fill the gap with their own experience.
"Block out" is just as telling. We block out light with curtains and noise with headphones, and we only bother when something is pressing to get in. So the speaker's claim of control quietly admits the opposite. The rhythm backs this up. The line "that I block out" is only four syllables long and ends on two heavy beats, like a door being shut. It is the shortest line in the poem, and the effort of suppression gets a line to itself.
Then the poem turns. "So different at a distance" has no "I" and no strong verb. The speaker stops asserting and starts noticing. The little word "so" suggests surprise, as if distance had changed the office without permission. The poem does not say how it is different, and leaves a simile to do the work: "like a laugh in the night."
That image can be read two ways. A laugh heard at night usually comes from somewhere else, such as another room, the street or a party the listener is not at. It is a sound without a body, cut off from whatever joke caused it. Heard that way, the office might have softened from stern judge into something almost companionable, a place of colleagues and voices, perhaps even missed. But night is also when defences drop and sounds startle us awake. A laugh in the dark can be eerie, or can seem aimed at the listener, an echo of the reproach in a new form. The poem holds both possibilities. Whatever the speaker blocked out by day has found a way in at night, in a different shape.
The form suits this uncertainty. There is no rhyme: "reproach" and "out" do not chime, and neither do "distance" and "night." There are no capitals or full stops either, so the lines read like a thought drifting past rather than a finished statement. Each couplet pairs a longer line with a shorter one, and the second shorter line, "like a laugh in the night," ends on a long, open vowel that lets the poem fade rather than snap shut. The sounds shift too. The first couplet is full of hard stops (reproach, block, out), while the second moves through softer, flowing sounds. "Different" and "distance" echo each other with their opening d, and "laugh in the night" slides along on l and n. The music moves from clenched to loosened as the speaker's feelings do.
The poem is worth reading because it takes a very familiar experience and gives it unfamiliar shape. Most of us know that leaving a workplace does not mean leaving our feelings about it behind. The poem offers no verdict and does not say whether the speaker feels relief, guilt or longing. Its main insight is that distance does not remove the thing we are avoiding but changes how it arrives, from an accusing face into a half-heard sound. For students, it shows how much a short poem can do with one precise word, "reproach," and one well-chosen simile.