Gunfire is a title that braces you for violence, and for six lines the poem keeps you braced. Only the final two words turn the whole thing over: the sound we were told was a weapon turns out to be "the talking rain." Reading the poem is largely a matter of watching that reversal arrive, and noticing how much of it was already seeping in beforehand.
The opening line, "I drink a draft of desire," sets the speaker in a state of appetite. Drinking is a physical, almost thirsty verb, and "draft" can mean a mouthful of liquid as well as a rough version of something. The line is also the most regular in the poem, close to a smooth iambic beat (I DRINK a DRAFT of deSIRE), so it feels like a settled sip before the rhythm breaks up. Then comes the bleakest stretch: "A gun gives widowhood / and the discourse of revenge." Bonta makes the gun a giver, and what it hands out is a condition and a vocabulary rather than a wound. Widowhood is a social identity, something you live inside long after the shot. "Discourse" is a cold, academic word for something as hot as revenge, which suggests that vengeance has its own scripts and phrases that people fall into almost automatically.
That idea of language is the poem's hidden spine. Follow the words: "discourse," "sermon," "eloquent," "pulpit," "talking." The gun speaks, the preacher speaks, and in the end the rain speaks. Even the poem's one unnerving line, "to meet and dissolve, to issue hurt," belongs to this pattern. The two infinitives sound like a grim summary of what revenge does, with people meeting, dissolving and causing pain. But "dissolve" and "issue" are also water verbs. Things dissolve in rain, and liquids issue from a source. Judging by the diction, the rain has entered the poem before it is named, and the language of violence is already softening into the language of weather. The repeated "dis-" sound in "discourse" and "dissolve" also ties the two ideas together, as though one word were quietly dissolving into the other.
The sound of the poem is free of rhyme. It relies on short, plain lines and small echoes instead, such as the hard g of "gun gives" or the d of "draft" and "desire." Line lengths shift in a way that matters. Line 4, with its comma and double infinitive, runs longest and most tangled, as if the speaker were stumbling through the logic of retaliation. Then the sentence changes: "I was glad to hear a sermon / too eloquent for a pulpit—". The dash is the key mark. It holds a breath before the reveal, and the last line, "the talking rain," lands as three light, unhurried beats after all the heavier phrasing.
The shift in tone is where the poem becomes interesting. "I was glad" is startling after widowhood and revenge. Because it is in the past tense, it reads like a memory of relief, or of being startled out of one mood into another. The poem does not say the rain cancels grief or that the gun never fired. It offers something smaller and more believable, a moment in which a sound associated with harm is heard differently. Rain on a roof or leaves can easily be mistaken for distant shots, and the title seems to play on that kind of mishearing, though the poem never states it outright.
The phrase "too eloquent for a pulpit" gives the poem its quiet argument. A pulpit stands for human authority, for people telling other people how to feel about suffering. The rain needs no building, no preacher and no congregation, and it outspeaks them anyway. Set against the self-repeating "discourse of revenge," its speech is open-ended, and the poem seems to prefer it.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in seven short lines. It moves from desire to violence to consolation without explaining the moves, and it lets a single image carry the shift. It also shows how a poem can take the vocabulary of violence and gently redirect it, so that by the end "gunfire" is something a person can be glad to listen to.