Six short lines, no punctuation, and an instruction that sounds easy until you try it: "try to see the sea." The sea is hard to see in any complete way. It has no edge you can stand outside of, and what we call seeing it is usually a glimpse of one stretch of water from one shore. The opening verb, "try," admits this. The speaker doesn't command; he asks for an effort, and the effort is the subject of the poem.
The first couplet gives the sea a human reach: it is "touching us all." The verb is gentle and physical, closer to a hand than a force, and "all" refuses to sort people into those near the coast and those far from it. Dave Bonta's title, "Maritime," points the same way. It is a word about the sea and the things that border it, and, judging by its spelling, it also has "time" folded inside it. That may be coincidence, but the poem's second half seems to invite the reading, because it turns from space to time.
That turn happens through a change of pronoun. "Us all" widens into "whoever shall come next," a phrase that includes people who don't exist yet. "Shall" is a solemn, almost legal or scriptural word, and it lends the future a kind of weight. Then comes the plainest, most unavoidable verb in the poem: "must be born." The line is only three syllables long, the shortest of the six, and the shortness feels like a fact being stated rather than argued. Nobody chooses to arrive.
The most careful piece of construction is what happens at the stanza break. The sentence doesn't pause where the white space falls. "Must be born" ends one stanza, and "into this work" begins the next, so the reader has to cross a gap to finish the thought. The effect is a small enactment of birth, a passage from one space into another, carrying the sentence along. Because there is no punctuation to hold it in place, the poem never lets you rest before the crossing.
"This work" is deliberately open. It could mean labor, the ongoing business of living, the task of paying attention to the world, or even the poem itself as a made thing. The demonstrative "this" is what makes it feel immediate. It points at something already in front of us, as if the speaker could gesture at it. The newcomers are born into the work, not given it afterwards, so it is something they inherit from the start rather than choose.
The last line, "this way of being full," is where the poem's meaning gathers and stays unsettled. Full of what? The word carries the tide at its height, a body carrying a child, a life crowded with experience, a cup that has to be refilled. The poem doesn't choose, and each reading fits the sea theme. Ending on "full" also gives the thin, quiet lines a surprising generosity. After so little has been said, the last word claims abundance.
There is no rhyme, but the poem has plenty of sound pattern. "See" and "sea" are the same sound with two meanings, so the opening line seems to repeat itself in order to make the point that perceiving and the thing perceived are tangled together. "Work" and "way" share their opening sound, and the two words are paired inside the last stanza, which ties labor to manner of living. The two ends of the poem's sentences, "all" and "full," echo each other in their closing -ll, a faint chiming that links the first idea, being touched by everyone's sea, to the last, being full of it. The rhythm is built from short, mostly monosyllabic words, so the lines move at a walking pace, with the stresses falling close together and the whole thing feeling plain-spoken.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It joins an ecological-sounding image, the sea that touches everyone, to a human one, the generations arriving in turn, without saying how they connect. That connection is left to the reader, which seems to be the point. The poem asks you to do a small piece of the work it describes, to look at something too large to see and keep looking anyway.