Sixteen words, not one punctuation mark, and a whole scene stands up out of them: old soldiers on a street, wine close at hand, singing into bad weather. What the poem is about is easy to say. What it means is harder to pin down, and Dave Bonta seems to want it that way.
Start with how the lines run together. "bottles of raw wine" is a fragment, and the next line, "the old soldiers", can attach either upward or downward. Read it with the line above, and the soldiers *are* the bottles of raw wine, so the title "Singing bottles" becomes a name for the men themselves, vessels filled with something rough that comes out as song. Read it with the line below, and the soldiers simply sit on the street singing, bottles beside them. With no punctuation to force a choice, both readings stay alive, and they blur together: men and bottles, drinker and drink.
The word "raw" matters. Raw wine is unfinished, harsh, probably cheap, nothing like a toast at a celebration. "Raw" also suggests exposed nerves and open wounds, so the drink and the drinkers share a rawness. Likewise "old" works twice, meaning aged and also long in service. The poem never says which war these men fought or what they lost, and that silence is deliberate. The single word "soldiers" carries a history that the reader has to supply.
The sound of the poem is carefully managed even though it has no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines run five, four, six and four syllables. The third, "sit on the street singing", is the longest and loosest, and it rolls forward like a tune. It is also the only line with a full verb phrase, so the singing gets the poem's one burst of action. Its hissing s sounds ("soldiers", "sit", "street", "singing") spread backward and forward through the poem, and by the end they seem to be the sound of the wind itself. The last line, "through wind and cold", is four monosyllables, each one heavy, like men pushing forward step by step. There are quieter echoes too. "Old" and "cold" nearly rhyme, so age and weather are tied together, and "wine" and "wind" differ by a single letter. Judging by the sound, the drink in the first line and the weather in the last are mirror images, the wine an answer to the wind.
"Through" is the most interesting word in the final line, because it can mean two things. It can mean *in spite of*, with the men singing against the cold. It can also mean *by way of*, with the song travelling through the wind and cold as if the weather were the air their voices need. The poem does not choose between defiance and simple passage. It also never says what they sing, or why, or whether the mood is celebration, comfort, habit or grief. The present tense and the missing full stop leave the scene running. The page ends on "cold", yet the singing is still going on.
"Street" deserves a glance as well. These men are outdoors and in public, which suggests, as an inference, that they live at the edge of things, though the poem names no poverty and no audience. Nobody pities them in the text. There is no adjective telling us how to feel beyond "raw" and "old", and no comment from a speaker. Everything is image.
That restraint is what makes the poem worth reading. It is close to haiku in its compression and its trust in a single picture, although it does not follow the 5-7-5 pattern. By refusing to explain, it lets a small scene carry a large question: what do people who have been through the worst do with the time they have left? Here the answer is neither speeches nor memorials. It is drink, company and a song that the wind cannot quite carry off. The title repeats the word "singing" from the third line, which tells us where the poem puts its weight. The cold and the rawness are real, but the song is what the poem ends up listening to.