Twenty-four syllables, five lines and one hen: Dave Bonta's "Chicken" holds a small philosophy of not worrying in less space than most of us need to clear our throats. It reads like a set of instructions the speaker gives himself, or us, and every line is an order or a challenge. The central idea is that we should stop treating our lives as a problem to be audited ahead of time, and trust a simpler, slower kind of knowing.
The opening command, "Be a stranger," can be read in a few ways. A stranger is someone unburdened by history, who has no reputation to keep up and no habits to repeat. The speaker may be asking for that freshness, or for a loosening of the self-importance that makes us rehearse who we are. Then comes the poem's only question: "In the afternoon, who cons night?" The verb is the clever part. To "con" something is, in older usage, to study it closely, to pore over it as a student pores over a lesson. It also sounds like the modern "con," a trick or swindle. Both senses fit. Anyone who spends the afternoon studying the coming dark is wasting the light they have, and perhaps being fooled by their own fears. Night is the unknown, afternoon is the present, and the question suggests the two shouldn't be mixed up.
The answer to that worry is surprisingly humble. Instead of a plan, the speaker hands the verdict to an animal: "Let my hen tell me / when the mess paid off." The possessive "my" suggests a creature the speaker lives with, though the poem never says so outright. The vocabulary is what makes these lines interesting. "Paid off" is the language of accounts and investments, while "mess" is the language of the yard, the muddle of feed and droppings and scratched-up dirt. Setting them together, the poem quietly mocks the idea that effort and reward can be tallied by a clever mind. If the payoff comes at all, the hen will announce it, perhaps with an egg, perhaps just by carrying on being a hen. Notice too that the mess is not denied or tidied up. It is the thing that eventually "paid off," as if the speaker accepts that most worthwhile work looks like a muddle while it is happening.
The sound of the poem supports this modest wisdom. The lines grow and shrink unevenly: four syllables, then a long eight, then two short lines of five, and finally a two-syllable stub. The long second line, with its ambling question, is like a mind wandering into worry, and the lines after it pull the mind back down to earth. There is no regular rhyme scheme, but "me" at the end of line three and "be" at the end of line five do chime, and "be" also begins the poem. That gives the whole piece a loop, from "Be a stranger" to "Let be." The repeated "Let" at the start of lines three and five adds to the effect. The short vowels in "Let my hen tell me" and "mess" are clipped and homely, close to the sound of pecking.
That last line, "Let be," drops the "it" from the familiar "let it be," which makes it sound older and more final, like something said once and meant. It also grammatically echoes the opening: "Be" and "Let be" bracket the poem like a pair of hands opening. The command is to exist without managing, which is harder than it sounds.
The title adds a small note of humour. "Chicken" names the bird, but the word also means a coward, and a reader might wonder, as an inference rather than a certainty, whether fear of the coming night is part of the joke. If so, the hen is the one creature in the poem with no use for such fear.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it needs. It contains no big landscape and no grand statement, only a question about night, a hen and a shrug. Yet it gives a way of living that students can try themselves: spend the afternoon in the afternoon, and let results announce themselves in their own time.