Dave Bonta's short poem is about a loss that time refuses to shrink. The speaker says that "yesterday grew into forever," as if a single terrible moment kept expanding until it swallowed everything after it. The image of "the burial of each little hand" suggests the dead were children, and the word "each" makes us picture them one by one, not as a faceless number.
The speaker keeps looking back "again and again," unable to leave the memory alone. That repetition feels compulsive, like pressing on a bruise. The final lines, "suffering anew / in the language of rifles," hint that the cause is gun violence, though the poem never names an event, and I'd be guessing to say which. What the phrase does suggest is that violence has its own speech, and that each time we hear it, the old pain returns fresh.
The mood is quiet, stunned, and heavy. The short lines and plain words leave a lot of silence around the grief.