Four lines, no punctuation, no rhyme, and yet Dave Bonta's "Broken windows" feels like a complete argument with itself. The speaker imagines being glad "to not wonder" and glad "to see but not discern the poor." Then a small hinge-word, "or," opens a second possibility that is hardly more comfortable: "in my breast cold justice / in a broken window." The poem is about the uneasy gap between looking at poverty and knowing what to do with what you see. Its central idea seems to be that both easy exits, comfortable blindness and chilly, principle-only fairness, leave something broken.
Begin with the grammar of the opening wish. "I would be glad" is conditional, so the speaker is not glad. He imagines a relief he doesn't have. "Wonder" is a rich word to give up. It can mean curiosity, the habit of asking why, and it can mean awe. To "not wonder" is to stop questioning, and perhaps to stop being moved. The next line sharpens this by pairing two verbs that sound close but are not. To "see" is only to register something with the eyes. To "discern" is to tell things apart, to judge, and perhaps to perceive morally. The hissing "s" of "discern" makes it the most deliberate word in the line, and it is the one the speaker would like to be spared. Even the phrase "the poor" enacts the failure it describes. A definite article and an adjective turned noun make a single blur of a group. Nobody in it has a face.
The second stanza has no verb at all, so the reader must decide how its pieces connect. Perhaps the speaker would also be glad to have "in my breast cold justice." Perhaps the breast itself is the "broken window," a damaged pane through which the chill of justice blows. Or perhaps justice is what one sees in a broken window, evidence of a hard life in someone's house. The poem refuses to choose. "Cold" works on two levels at once. Justice that is cold is detached and rule-bound, lacking warmth. And cold is also literally what comes through broken glass. The image carries the idea that fairness without feeling is a draught rather than a shelter. It also links back to the first stanza, because a window is for seeing through, and a broken one distorts and fragments what is behind it. That is the nearest the poem comes to showing "seeing but not discerning" as a picture.
The title adds another layer. It is plural, while the poem's final window is singular, as if one cracked pane stood for many houses and many breasts. A reader may also hear in "broken windows" an echo of public arguments about disorder and policing. That is an inference from the phrase, not something the poem states. If the echo is intended, it gives "cold justice" a harder edge, suggesting order enforced from a distance.
The poem's shape quietly supports its meaning. Counting syllables, the lines shrink from eight to eight to seven to six, so the poem narrows toward silence and ends on an object, not a conclusion. Without a full stop, it stays open. The first and last lines both end on two-syllable words with an unstressed finish, "wonder" and "window," and these share the sounds w, n and d. Whether or not it was planned, the echo makes a frame in which an inner act of questioning begins the poem and the thing one looks through ends it. Inside that frame, "breast" and "broken" chime in their opening consonants, tying the body to the damage. The hard, clipped "cold justice" falls on the ear as it feels.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to flatter anyone. The speaker implicates himself with "I" and "my breast," and he offers no compassion to hide behind. He admits that indifference is tempting and that principled coldness is not much better. The ambiguity then hands the work to the reader. To make sense of these four lines you have to do the very thing the speaker wished to avoid, which is to look closely and discern.