Most poems about the sea promise calm: a wide horizon, a slow breath, a place to forget your worries. Dave Bonta's three lines do the opposite. They give us a morning shoreline and then let it turn into noise, and into something close to a personality. The sea has errands, obligations, a whole working day ahead of it, and the speaker can't escape hearing about it.
The poem is built from fragments. There is not one verb in it. "Morning sea" is simply set down, like a caption under a photograph. The second line, "the din of her business," is another noun phrase, and the third, "in my ears," is only a prepositional phrase. Without a verb nothing is happening, so the scene feels fixed in a single moment, and the speaker is on the receiving end of it. He doesn't listen, hear or notice. The sound is just there, *in* his ears, the way water is in a harbour. The structure is also lopsided. The first and last lines are very short, about three syllables each by my count, and the middle line is longer, so the loud, crowded line is hemmed in on both sides. The shape mimics the experience: the din sits between the two quiet bookends, filling the space between sea and ear.
The word choices carry most of the meaning. "Din" is not a gentle word. It means a harsh, continuous clatter, and it is a surprising thing to call waves. Even its sound is blunt, one short syllable that lands like a dropped tray. Notice how the short "i" of "din" comes back in "business" and then again in "in": din, business, in. This is a small, almost unnoticeable pattern, but it gives the line a fussy, pattering quality, like small objects being shuffled around. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the poem doesn't need them. The echoing vowels do the work that a rhyme scheme would do in a longer poem.
Then there is "her." The pronoun is the hinge of the whole poem, and it can swing two ways. Because the first line names the sea and English has a long tradition of speaking of the sea as feminine, "her business" may simply be the sea's own: its tides, its churning, its endless turning-over of stones and shells. The word "business" then quietly has fun with us, because we don't usually think of nature as having a job. But the poem doesn't say that. "Her" could just as easily be a woman, someone whose busy talk, errands or movements are competing with the morning sea for the speaker's attention. In that reading the sea is only the setting, and what fills the speaker's ears is human and domestic. Judging by the text alone, both readings hold, and the poem seems content to leave them layered. The sea might be behaving like a person, or a person might be drowning out the sea. Either way the line blurs the boundary between nature and the everyday world of obligations.
The title adds another layer. "High tide" is the only place where the tide is mentioned, and it tells us the sound is at its fullest, as if the din is rising. It also makes the speaker's ears feel like a shoreline, with noise washing up over them. This is an interpretation, but the title seems chosen to turn a small domestic or seaside moment into something that swells and floods. Since "high tide" also suggests a peak or turning point, it carries a faint comic note: this is the most the world can possibly crowd in.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. Like many short English-language poems of this kind, it relies on a cut between an image and a reaction, and it trusts the reader to connect them. It also subverts an expectation. We arrive wanting peace, and we get a mild, wry irritation instead, the feeling of wanting quiet while everything around you gets on with its day. That is a recognisable human moment, and by leaving "her" open, the poem lets you decide whether the one making the noise is the ocean or someone you love.