Bonta begins as casually as if he were describing an afternoon outing: "we go to see a man / hanged for robbery." The verb "go" and the plural "we" make the execution a spectacle, something a crowd turns up for. The crime is named in the flattest way possible, "robbery", a crime against property, and the lines stop short of saying whether the punishment fits it. The title, "Capital punishment", is just as clinical, a phrase from a statute book. Everything the poem then does is to push that cold abstraction up against a human body.
The turn comes in the second couplet, when "we" narrows to "I". The speaker touches the corpse "with my bare hand." The word "bare" matters. There is no glove, no distance, and the line suggests a deliberate crossing of the line between spectator and participant. Having watched, the speaker needs to know what the thing they have watched actually is. The poem never says why, which keeps the gesture strange and a little shocking.
What the hand finds is described in a pair of similes that look gentle: "cold as silk / sleek as a seed." Silk suggests something expensive and smooth, and since the man died for theft, it is hard not to hear a faint irony in a luxury fabric standing in for his skin. That is my inference rather than something the poem states. The sound of the lines is just as careful. "Cold," "silk," "sleek" and "seed" repeat their s and k sounds, and "sleek" and "seed" share a long e, so the two phrases slide against each other like the surface they describe. The seed is the more striking image. A seed is small, smooth and closed, and it is also the beginning of something. Here it is a seed that has been put beyond growing, a potential that has been cancelled.
The fourth couplet is the strangest: "and I hear the fuddled / impossibility of a heart." The speaker has put a hand on a body and yet claims to hear, which blurs the senses in a way that suggests the experience is not quite rational. "Fuddled" usually describes a drunk or sleepy mind, so it is an odd word to attach to a heart. It could describe the speaker's own bewilderment, or it could imagine the heart as confused, still trying to go on beating after it has been told to stop. "Impossibility" is the longest and most abstract word in the poem, and it sits among short, plain ones. The line break after "fuddled" delays the noun, so we wait for it as the speaker waits for a pulse. What arrives is not a heartbeat but its absence, named as something that cannot be.
The last couplet shifts from the central organ to something small and almost comic: "the teeth that will never now / fall out." Teeth fall out in childhood and again in old age, so the image holds a whole lifespan inside it. The hanged man has been denied the ordinary decay of growing old, and the poem finds that loss in a trivial bodily detail rather than in a grand statement. The odd word order of "never now" gives the line a weary, almost old-fashioned ring, and the break before "fall out" lets the poem end on a falling, quiet drop. Teeth also look a little like seeds, small, hard and pale, so the ending quietly echoes the earlier image.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and it uses no capital letters or punctuation. It is built from five two-line stanzas, each a single thought, and the short lines give the flat, reporting tone of someone who is holding back. Bonta never says that capital punishment is wrong. He doesn't need to. The poem's force comes from what it chooses to notice: a texture, a missing sound, a future that will never arrive. By making the reader feel the loss in the body, it argues more effectively than a protest could, and it leaves the reader, like the speaker, with a hand that has touched something it cannot easily let go of.