The title does something quietly impossible. "After forever" asks what can come once the word for "never ending" has ended. Dave Bonta's poem lives in that impossible place. Its eight lines describe a grief that has stopped being an event in the past and become a permanent condition. It does this without a single comma or full stop, and the only capital letter is the lone "I".
Start with the verb. "yesterday grew / into forever" uses "grew", a gentle word from gardens and childhood, for something that should not grow: a day. Then the sentence jumps the stanza break and repeats itself: "grew into the burial / of each little hand". The repetition works like a chain, each link dragging the next. The reader slides from an ordinary yesterday to eternity to a graveyard with no chance to get off. Growth, the thing we associate with children, is turned inside out, and what grows is the loss.
The poem names no place, date or event, so everything about what happened has to be inferred from its imagery. "Little hand" and "rifles" suggest children killed by gunfire, but the poem never says so. What it offers is a single body part. A hand is what holds, grips and waves, and it is a small, intimate detail where a general word like "victims" would be abstract. The word "each" matters too. It insists the burials happen one at a time, so the poem counts where it could have summed up.
In the third couplet the tense shifts from the past "grew" to the present, and the speaker finally appears: "I look back / again and again". The line break makes the phrase look back on itself, and "again and again" repeats inside its own words, like a mind returning to the same room. The line lengths follow this. The poem opens with two four-syllable lines, swells to six and five, then drops to a three-syllable "I look back", the smallest the speaker ever gets. It ends on its longest line, six syllables, as though everything has been building toward the last image.
That last image comes in the final couplet. "suffering anew" is a shrewd phrase. "Anew" promises freshness, but after "again and again" it becomes a curse, because the pain doesn't wear down with repetition and returns at full strength. "Anew" also rhymes with "grew", the word that ended the poem's very first line. It is the only echo of its kind in a poem with no rhyme scheme, so it stands out. The ending quietly folds back into the beginning, which fits a poem about time that cannot move forward.
Then comes "in the language of rifles". The metaphor is deliberately open. Perhaps the speaker suffers in a vocabulary dictated by guns, or perhaps the rifles themselves are the ones speaking. Either way, "language" implies a grammar of blunt, repeated bursts. The poem's own diction is the opposite: short, ordinary words like "hand", "back" and "yesterday". "rifles" is the one hard noun, plural, landing last. After it, there is no period. The poem simply stops, and the missing punctuation leaves the grief as unfinished as "forever".
What makes the poem significant is how much it does with how little. It compresses the way trauma bends time, so that yesterday never passes, into a handful of plain words. It also avoids easy sentimentality. Beyond "little" and "suffering", it uses almost no emotional vocabulary, and it trusts a hand, a burial and a gun to carry the weight. By withholding names and events, it lets the reader supply the particular tragedy, and perhaps think of more than one. There is a quiet argument in its form too. Violence speaks in the loud, repetitive language of rifles, and the poem answers in small words and a speaker who can only look back. That restraint is what stays with you after reading it.