Thirteen words, and not one of them is a verb. Dave Bonta's "Witness" gives us an execution, a hat, some rain and a walk, and it never says what anyone does or feels. The poem is about the gap between a public event and the private afterward. At midday something irreversible happens. Then the speaker has to go home, and the poem suggests that the walk is where the event really lands.
Look at how the three lines divide the experience. The execution gets one line, and a flat one: "at noon an execution." There is no adjective, no judgment and no description of who died or how. The indefinite article is quietly chilling, because it is "an" execution, not "the" one, as if it were one entry in a calendar. Noon is the hour of fullest daylight, so judging by the time stamp, nothing here is hidden or softened by dusk. The remaining two lines, more than half the poem, are given to the rain and the journey back. The proportions tell us where the poem's attention lies. The killing is over in a phrase, but the aftermath lasts "all the way home."
The speaker enters only in the second line, and only through a possession: "my hat." This is the poem's one first-person word, and it attaches the speaker to a small, ordinary object. A hat is a modest shelter, enough to keep the rain off the head but not enough to keep anything else out. The speaker has no words for horror or grief, only a sensation: water drumming on felt. The rain does the emotional work without being labelled as sorrow. It isn't obviously sympathetic weather, and it isn't obviously indifferent either. It simply keeps falling, the way a memory keeps repeating. The preposition "on" is telling. The rain is on the hat, not on the speaker, a small distance that may be the poem's way of showing a mind holding itself at arm's length from what it has seen.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. Counting syllables gives seven, five and four, so the poem tapers away like a breath running out. Nasal consonants thread through it: "noon," "an," "execution," "on," "rain," "home." Together they make a low hum under the words. The last line is built entirely of one-syllable words, "all the way home," and it reads at walking pace, one step per word. The absence of punctuation and capital letters means nothing stops the poem, just as nothing stops the walk. The lines run on and the rain continues, with no full stop to let the reader off.
The title is the key to the whole piece. "Witness" is both a noun and a verb: someone who sees, and the act of testifying to what was seen. The poem seems to perform that second meaning. It doesn't argue, protest or explain, and it offers only testimony: this happened, and this is what stayed with me. The title also suggests that the speaker was present, which makes the plainness of the language more striking. Someone who watched an execution could be expected to reach for large words, and instead the poem reaches for rain and a hat.
That restraint is what makes the poem significant. It trusts the reader to supply what is missing, and the omissions work hard. We don't know who was executed, or why, or what the speaker thinks of it. The poem takes no side and leaves the moral weight to the reader, who is brought, like the speaker, into the position of witness. Being a witness here means carrying the knowledge away with you, which is harder than watching. By ending on "home," the poem points to the uncomfortable fact that ordinary life is waiting at the end of the walk, and the speaker has to bring this event into it. Very little is said, and the silence around those few words is what the reader remembers.