Nobody in Dave Bonta's poem is named, and no place is given. There is a war, a street, some beggars and a sea, and from those few pieces the poem builds a quiet accusation about how people listen, or fail to.
It begins mid-conversation. "talking of the war" has no subject, no capital letter and no punctuation, so we seem to overhear the talk rather than be told about it. Only in the third couplet does a "we" appear, and then we realise these talkers are the same people who will later hear nothing. The poem sets two topics side by side. The war is large and probably far away. The beggars "in the streets" are close, yet they are held at a distance by the pronoun "they" and turned into something to discuss, not someone to answer.
The second couplet is the poem's surprise. We expect the beggars to want money, but they beg "not for money but time / to enjoy the world." Money can be handed over in a second and forgotten. Time cannot. The line is also ambiguous. It could mean the leisure that poverty denies, or, placed next to the war, the chance simply to stay alive long enough to enjoy anything. The poem never chooses, and the war in the first line makes the darker reading hard to ignore. There is irony too in the phrase "enjoy the world," which is gentle, almost luxurious. The beggars ask for what the talkers seem to have in surplus, and one thing they spend it on is talk. The sounds of "war" and "world" echo each other, as if the poem were holding what is destroyed and what is wanted in the same breath.
The title, "Surf," does not appear in the text until the simile arrives: the beggars "call to us / like a contrary sea." Surf is where the sea breaks against the shore, and its roar is so constant that people stop noticing it. That one image explains the whole poem. "Contrary" is also the only word of three syllables in a poem of plain, short words, so it stands out the way the sea does. It suggests opposition, a current running against the way we are swimming, and also something stubborn and awkward. The beggars' request runs against the usual logic of begging, and their calling pulls against the direction of our lives. Yet a sea is not a voice. By comparing a human plea to a natural force, the poem makes it vast and impersonal, and so easy to tune out.
Then comes the paradox of the ending: "and so for days / we hear nothing." Surf is loud, but the result is silence. Either the calling is so overwhelming that it drowns everything out, or we have learned to treat it as background noise. The poem leaves both possibilities open. The words "and so" give the sentence the tone of an excuse, a consequence that sounds almost reasonable. "For days" suggests this is not a single lapse but a habit. And "nothing," the last word, is what the beggars' plea for time receives in return.
The form carries the same movement. The poem is four unrhymed couplets with no punctuation, so the lines run on like successive waves. Most lines are four to six syllables, with one longer line, "and how they beg in the streets," where the sentence spills forward like water reaching up a beach. After that the lines pull back. The final couplet is the shortest, four syllables a line, and the poem retreats into the silence it describes. Soft *s* sounds run through "streets," "us," "sea," "so" and "days," a faint hiss under the words like foam on sand.
The poem is significant because it enacts what it describes. It never raises its voice, and it could be read in seconds and forgotten. It offers no verdict and no heroic speaker, only a "we" that quietly includes the reader. Its point about attention is that moral appeals rarely fail through cruelty. More often they dissolve into the noise we have stopped noticing.