Poems about exile usually ache for home. Dave Bonta's "In exile" does something stranger and colder. It gives us a ruined port, a handful of old people who swear at one another, and a view of a dirty road. There is no homeland glowing in memory and no speech of grief. Exile here is not a dramatic event but a condition: being somewhere nobody would think to look, with nothing left to do but quarrel and watch.
The poem's shape is part of its argument. It is seven short lines in three stanzas, a pair, a trio and another pair, with no punctuation and no capital letters. The grammar keeps slipping. The first stanza is a fragment, a place with no verb attached: "an out-of-the-way sea / where the port is a ruin." The second stanza strings together three predicates with no commas to separate them: "we are all old / swear at one another / must not be found." Because nothing is punctuated, the lines run together. Being old, being bad-tempered and being in hiding blur into one condition. We cannot tell which is the cause and which the consequence.
There is no rhyme, and the rhythm is flat and spoken, close to the way someone might mutter. Still, the line lengths do something. They hover around five or six syllables, then shrink, and the last line, "of the road," is the shortest in the poem. The poem seems to run out of breath at exactly the point where it reaches its bleakest observation. Sound matters too. "Sea" appears twice and "see" once, and the homophone quietly ties the two ideas together. The sea is where they are, and it is also where they *see*. The hyphenated "out-of-the-way" works the same way, packing a whole phrase into a single lump, like a place the speaker cannot get out of.
The imagery is spare, but each piece is chosen with care. A port is meant to be where journeys begin and end, and here it is "a ruin." The sea, usually a symbol of freedom and escape, becomes a dead end, since a ruined harbour means no ships coming or going. The people are not heroic outcasts. They are "all old," and their only recorded activity is swearing at each other, the small, grinding friction of people stuck together. Against that, the last word-picture is oddly abstract. The speaker does not write "the dirty road." He writes "the dirtiness / of the road." That noun has an almost clinical sound, as if the quality of dirtiness had been observed and filed away, and it makes the road feel judged from far away.
The word "therefore" is the hinge. "And therefore the sea" suggests a chain of reasoning. Because "we" must not be found, we are here, at this unvisited shore. The poem never says who is searching or why, so "must not be found" could mean hiding, being hidden or simply being forgotten. Judging by the text, the road seems to stand for the way back to the world, or the way the world might come looking. Distance gives the exiles a clear view of it, and what they see is not longing but dirt. That is one reading, though, and the poem deliberately leaves the road open.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it refuses to do. It does not explain, console or ask for sympathy. It strips exile down to a few unglamorous facts, a ruin, old age, bad temper and a view, and trusts the reader to feel their weight. The unfinished syntax mimics lives that have stalled, and the closing image turns the usual direction of longing upside down. The speaker looks back at the road not with nostalgia but with clear-eyed distaste. For a student reading closely, the poem shows that restraint can say more than rhetoric. By leaving out the reasons and the backstory, it makes the situation feel real and unresolved, like a place you can see clearly but cannot easily leave.