Someone tells you that you have a gift, and you are supposed to say thank you. Dave Bonta's "Gifted" opens with exactly that kind of compliment, then uses its remaining lines to show how little comfort it brings. The speaker is praised for "sitting with the dead," a quiet, human talent: staying in the room when others cannot. The reply is not modest thanks, though. It is a short catalogue of things known, each stranger than the last.
The grammar of the opening is worth noticing. "People speak of my gift" is reported speech. The gift is a reputation, not a boast, and the speaker holds the word at arm's length, like a label someone else has stuck on them. The title works the same way. "Gifted" can mean talented, but it can also mean simply handed over, whether you wanted it or not. Read like that, the poem is less about skill than about something imposed.
Then the voice turns. "I know the disease of the stone." Stone is what we usually think of as the opposite of illness: hard, lasting, the material of memorials. Giving it a disease suggests that even what is built to outlast the dead can decay. Stone might also be the body itself, cold and heavy, so that the disease is what is left when life has gone. The poem does not choose between these readings. The next line pushes further: "the hot pie made of a swan." A swan means whiteness and grace, and perhaps the old idea of a swan's last song. Baking it into a pie, hot and domestic and ready to eat, is jarring. Swans were once served at grand feasts, so there is a trace of ceremony here, but the effect is closer to dream logic, with beauty cooked and death served as a meal. "Hot" matters too. It is the only warm thing in a poem full of cold, and the warmth belongs to a carcass.
The last stanza begins with "how," which grammatically continues the "I know" list, even though the stanza break and the lack of punctuation make it feel like a new thought drifting in: "how a rose cried / at the sight of my hands." This is the poem's one moment of open feeling, and it is aimed at the speaker. Roses are what people lay on graves, yet this one weeps not for the dead but at the hands that sit beside them. Whether those hands are tender or tainted, the poem never says. That ambiguity is its sharpest point. The person whose gift is comforting the dying appears, to the natural world, as something to grieve over or flinch from. The shift from the present-tense "I know" to the past-tense "cried" also gives the rose's reaction the weight of a single remembered event.
The form keeps all of this deadpan. There are three unrhymed couplets, no capital letters, and no punctuation, not even a full stop at the end. The missing punctuation flattens the voice, so that the bizarre images sound like routine facts. The lines swell to their longest at "I know the disease of the stone" and then shrink to the shortest, "how a rose cried," which seems to fall silent as it ends. There is no end-rhyme, but sound still does quiet work. The long "o" of "know," "stone" and "rose" runs through the middle and end of the poem. The long "i" of "pie," "cried," "sight" and "my" crowds the final lines, so that the speaker's own "my" sits inside the sound of crying.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it handles a stock idea, the gentle person who is good with death, and refuses to sweeten it. Its images do not explain themselves, and the reader has to decide what a diseased stone or a weeping rose might mean. In six lines it suggests that closeness to death changes what you know and how the world looks back at you, and that a "gift" can be closer to a burden.