Hardly anyone thinks about their ears until something goes wrong with them. Dave Bonta's four-line poem begins from that neglect. The title, "Taken for granted," names the problem, and the poem then gives the overlooked organ a voice, or at least a sympathetic witness. Its central idea is that the ear's constant, unrewarded openness is both a hardship and a wonder, and that listening may be the most generous thing a body does.
The first line is "how an ear must suffer." There is no capital letter and no punctuation, so we can't tell whether it is an exclamation, a question or a musing. The word "suffer" is startling because we don't usually think of an ear as capable of it. Yet the poem's logic is easy to grasp: unlike the eye, the ear has no lid. It can't shut itself against whatever arrives. "Out in the world," the second and shortest line, strips the idea down to exposure. The ear is a part of us that sits at the border between inside and outside, and the line break leaves it standing there.
Then the poem turns. Line three, "miracle of attendance to nobody," is by far the longest, and its length helps it feel like a swelling. Counting syllables, the lines run roughly six, four, eleven and seven, so the poem tightens and then opens up. "Attendance" is a rich word here. It means listening and paying attention, but it also suggests showing up, as in a register or roll call, and waiting on someone as a servant does. "To nobody" is deliberately slippery. It could mean the ear listens when there is no one speaking, or that it serves no one in particular, or that it receives sound that was never meant for it. In each reading the ear works faithfully without an audience or a thank-you. The poem asks us to see that as a miracle, which sits oddly beside "suffer" in the first line. The two words are the poem's tension: the same condition is a burden and a gift.
The final line, "a cave in the growing night," shifts from argument to image. The ear is now a cave, which fits its shape, a hollow opening into the head, and also its function. A cave catches sounds and gives them back as echo. It is a shelter, but also a dark and empty place. "Growing" is the word to notice. Night isn't simply falling here but spreading, so the cave opens onto a darkness that keeps expanding. Hearing becomes more important as sight fails, and the image suggests the ear keeps its watch when the eyes can do nothing. The long vowels of "growing night" slow the line down and let it settle after the crowded syllables of line three.
The grammar adds to this effect. Only the first line has a verb phrase ("must suffer"). The rest are fragments: a prepositional phrase, then two noun phrases with no verbs. The poem moves from a feeling about the ear to simply being the ear, which stays still and receives. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the poem needs none. The irregular line lengths and the missing punctuation make it sound like a thought arriving unprompted, close to the way hearing itself works.
The poem matters because it takes something ordinary and makes us notice it. Small as it is, it works as a lesson in attention. Most of what holds our lives together, such as breath, balance and hearing, goes unthanked precisely because it works. By calling the ear's quiet service a "miracle," the poem turns the neglect into a quiet reproach, and it hints that the best kind of listening is the kind that expects nothing in return. A reader who finishes it may well find themselves listening to the room for a moment, aware of the cave that has been open all along.