Eight short lines, and almost nothing is explained. Dave Bonta's "Response" gives us a speaker, a feeling and a moment of exchange, then withholds the context we would normally use to understand them. Who is being answered? Whose hands are they? What is the hate aimed at? The poem never says, and that silence is part of its method. What it offers instead is a sharp idea: the words we hand back to the world on cue, polite and customary and "expected", can be completely cut off from what we feel and from the part of us that sees.
The opening fragment, "true / in my hate", refuses to settle grammatically. "True" might simply mean genuine: the hate is real. It might also carry the older sense of faithful, as in being true to something. The line break leaves the word standing alone for a beat, like a declaration, before "in my hate" qualifies it. Honesty is placed in the most uncomfortable spot available. Of everything the speaker might perform, this is the one thing vouched for. There are no capital letters and no punctuation, so the claim arrives with no sentence around it and no apology.
The middle stanza is where the poem turns: "when I answer / the expected words / to unexpected hands". Look at how the language behaves here. "Unexpected" is just "expected" with a prefix attached, so the script and the surprise are separated by the smallest possible negation. The words are predictable, the kind of formula we produce automatically. The hands are not. Whether they offer, touch, grab or threaten, the poem leaves open, and the reader has to choose. The title adds a faint suggestion of ritual, since a "response" can be a line spoken from a set text, though that is an inference rather than anything the poem states.
The preposition is odd, too. The words go "to" hands, not to a person or a face. The other party has shrunk to a single body part, the part that reaches and acts. That reduction is quietly chilling, and it fits the hate announced a few lines earlier, since hate tends to see people in pieces. The sound supports this. "Hate" and "hands" begin with the same breathy h, as does "have" in the final stanza, so the feeling seems to travel across the poem and surface in the very word for what is held out to the speaker.
The ending is the most intriguing part: "the eye will have nothing / to do with it". The future tense makes it sound like a prediction, a vow or a warning. The idiom "have nothing to do with it" is ordinary, but the line break after "nothing" lets the word hang for a moment as an absence in its own right. And "eye" is a homophone of "I". The long *i* sound has been running through the poem ("my", "I", now "eye"), so it is hard not to hear the pun. If the eye is excluded, the response is given without looking, without recognition. If the "I" is excluded, the person speaking has separated from the one who feels, and the polite words come from a self that is not really there. The poem lets both readings stand.
Formally, the poem has no rhyme and no regular meter, but its shape is deliberate. Lines swell from one syllable ("true") to five, then six ("to unexpected hands", "the eye will have nothing"), and the last line drops to four. The short opening lines read like something blurted. The longer middle lines carry the awkward mechanical politeness, and the final line closes the door. The stanzas run two lines, three lines, two, a small symmetry that makes the poem feel contained, as if the speaker is holding it shut.
The poem is significant because it does so much with so little. It admits an ugly emotion without justifying it, and it doesn't claim hate is admirable. It observes that hate may be the most honest thing present while courtesy runs on regardless. The unsettling part is that nothing in the exchange seems to involve real seeing. The poem is also itself a response, stripped of ornament and explanation, which leaves the reader to supply the scene and decide how much of it they recognise.