A sniper's work depends on stillness, distance and a steady hand, so it is striking that Dave Bonta's speaker begins somewhere nothing is steady at all. "I dream that I am awake" is a small trap. It folds a dream inside a claim of wakefulness, and the reader cannot tell which layer is real. The next line makes things worse: "but we are in our graves." In six short lines the poem gives us a vision of death, a confession of paralysis and a strange kind of worship. Its central idea is that killing from a distance does not leave the killer untouched. In the dream, the person behind the weapon is already buried too.
The pronouns carry much of this. The poem opens with a lone "I", and then "we" appears without introduction. The poem never says who "we" are. Judging by the title, it could mean the sniper and the people he has shot, or the sniper and others like him. Either way, the line removes the safe gap between shooter and target that a rifle scope normally creates. "Our graves" is plural, so each of us has a grave of his own, but the possessive still binds us together. The one who seemed to stand outside death is counted among the dead.
The second couplet turns a cliché into an object. A "heavy heart" is usually a figure of speech, but here the heart is a thing the speaker "cannot raise", something with real weight, like equipment to be lifted. The verb matters. One raises a rifle to aim, and "raise" also carries the old sense of lifting one's spirits. The poem never says the speaker can lift the gun, but the contrast is implied: the heart is too heavy to move while the weapon is not. The phrasing "it being the heaviest thing I have" is oddly formal and flat, as if the speaker were taking inventory and reporting the result without self-pity. That dry tone makes the line more disturbing than a cry of grief would be. It is also the longest line in the poem, about ten syllables against the six or so of the lines around it, so it drags a little, as if the line itself were hard to lift.
The final couplet is the most unsettling. "I wonder at the gun" can mean two things: to question it, or to marvel at it. The poem keeps both meanings alive. Then comes "a dark little god", where each word does separate work. "Dark" suggests gunmetal, but also moral darkness. "Little" is both a diminutive and a faint tenderness, the way one might speak of a household idol. The lowercase "god" belongs to a minor deity, a thing that is worshipped and obeyed. The picture is of a speaker too weighed down to act on his own, handing the decision over to a small, portable object that has become an authority. The sounds support this. "Gun" and "god" begin with the same hard consonant, and "dark" quietly echoes "heart" from the stanza before. It is a near-rhyme, and it hints that the heart and the god are dark in the same way.
The poem's form is bare. It has three unrhymed couplets of free verse and no punctuation anywhere, not even a final full stop. The missing full stop keeps the poem open-ended, as if the dream has not finished. The only real music is a thread of long "a" sounds in "awake", "graves" and "raise", which links waking, death and lifting before the poem moves on to harder sounds. Each couplet also moves closer to something concrete: first a state of mind (dreaming), then a body part (the heart), then an object (the gun). The poem begins in fog and ends with something you could hold.
What makes the poem significant is its restraint. There is no battlefield, no enemy and no cause, and no moment of firing. The title supplies the speaker's occupation, and everything else is interior. Bonta does not tell us whether the sniper is guilty, numb or simply exhausted, and he neither defends nor condemns him. He leaves the reader with a few exact images: a dream that cannot be sorted into waking and sleeping, a heart too heavy to lift, and the strange, small authority of a weapon. A poem this short can be read in seconds, but the last line stays in the mind much longer.