Six short lines, no capital letters, no punctuation, and one unanswered question: Dave Bonta's "Absent" leaves very little on the page, which is how it makes its absence felt. The speaker asks what kind of love it is that keeps calling and yet is never present, and then, instead of an answer, a drum sounds once.
The first stanza turns on a small grammatical trick. "We should call and call / but not be there" can be read two ways. We may be calling to someone who has gone, or we may be the ones who fail to be present while we call. The poem never chooses, and the double reading is where its central idea lives. Love here is a relationship in which presence has broken down on both sides: the caller reaches out, the one called is missing, and perhaps the caller is not fully there either. The title adds to this. "Absent" is the word of the school register, and "call and call" echoes a roll being read out, a name repeated until it is clear nobody will answer.
The opening line, "what manner of love is this", sounds old-fashioned, almost scriptural, as if the speaker had borrowed the language of a sermon or a prayer. That register hints, though the poem never says so, that the calling could be a kind of prayer, or a grief addressed to someone who cannot reply. The absence of a question mark matters too. The question trails off into the next line rather than closing, as if the speaker does not expect an answer.
The line lengths are worth counting. The first stanza runs seven syllables, then six, then four, so the voice thins as it goes and ends on the flat "but not be there." Those last four words are all single syllables, and each has weight. The second stanza starts small again, with "where a drum came," also four syllables, then swells to "beating a single stroke" before settling into the quieter "out of the living." There is no rhyme and no regular meter, which suits a poem about something that fails to arrive. The nearest thing to a pattern is the heavy stress of the monosyllables, which lets the phrase "call and call" thud like the drum it anticipates.
That drum is the poem's one image, and it is deliberately hard to pin down. "Where" is a slippery hinge: it points back to the place the speaker cannot be, and then something arrives there without warning. A drum is a signal, something used to summon, to march, to mourn. Yet this one gives only "a single stroke," the opposite of the repeated "call and call." Against the speaker's endless, wearing effort stands one decisive sound. Whether it answers the calling or ends it is left open.
The last line, "out of the living," is the most ambiguous of all. It could mean that the stroke comes from among living people, or that it comes out of life itself, so that the sound is something leaving the world of the living. Read the second way, a single beat is a heart's last, or the stroke of a funeral drum. The word "living" can sound consoling and chilling at once. Because there is no full stop, the poem does not end so much as stop speaking, and the silence after the drum becomes part of it.
What makes "Absent" worth reading is that it does so much with so little. It never names who has gone or who is calling, and it gives no scene or backstory, so each reader fills the gap with their own loss. The poem suggests that love is not only presence but also the habit of reaching toward someone who cannot be reached, and that the answer, when it comes, may be one hard, final sound. A poem this short can be read in seconds, but the question in its first line stays with you much longer.