Everyone knows the joke behind the title: when someone is offered strange meat, the standard reassurance is that it "tastes like chicken." Dave Bonta's seven-line poem takes that promise and runs with it. Everything in it ends up poultry-flavoured, and the result is part comic fable and part small storm.
The opening stanza sets up a scene almost like a nursery tale. A "great hen, very angry" begins to "pull down the dove and the lark." The two victims are the birds we most associate with peace and song, so the violence feels like a small outrage. Then comes the phrase "a pretty dish." It works on two levels. It is a cook's phrase, with the doves and larks as a table presentation, and it is also an ironic comment, as if the narrator were admiring the carnage. Notice, too, that "began" sits at the end of the first line. The sentence starts a story and the line break leaves it hanging, and the poem never lets us see the hen finish.
In the middle the poem swerves. "The mouth dropped thirty guns / in a high debate with the sea." The barnyard is gone and we are somewhere with cannon and water. It is unclear whose mouth this is. It could be the hen's, grown monstrous, or a harbour or river mouth, or just a mouth that speaks. The verb "dropped" is slippery as well, since one drops anchor, drops a hint, or drops a bomb. "Thirty guns" has a naval ring, and "debate" turns an argument between ship and ocean into something almost parliamentary. The poem's logic here is the logic of collision. Hunger and anger have been inflated until they fill a seascape, and we are left to decide whether the hen has become a warship or whether the sea has simply swallowed the metaphor. The jumpy way the images join suggests cut-and-paste composition, though that is a guess from the style, not something the text states.
The last stanza deflates it all. "It blew hard" is the plainest sentence in the poem, three short stressed words with a full stop in the middle of the line. It could describe wind, or a tantrum, or just a blustering, exhausted anger. Then the poem ends on a surprisingly domestic note: "The great fowl's / mother was put to bed." The break after "fowl's" holds back the word "mother" for a beat, and when it arrives it brings a lullaby-like tenderness. "Great" also returns from the first line, so the "great hen" has become the "great fowl," as if the epic has shrunk back to a child being tucked in. "Put to bed" can mean tenderness, but it can also mean something final, and the poem lets both readings stand.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. It relies on sound and syntax instead. The first stanza has a soft, rounded run of d's and l's ("dove," "lark," "dish"), while the middle stanza gets harder consonants ("thirty guns," "high debate"). The stanzas shrink from three lines to two and two, as though the poem were running out of breath. Its imagery stays remarkably consistent in one respect, because the whole thing is bird talk ("hen," "dove," "lark," "fowl"), even when the setting is ships and weather. That consistency is probably the real answer to the title. Whatever the poem eats, whether a battle, a storm, or a mother, it serves up in the language of the henhouse.
The poem is worth reading because it is funny without explaining its jokes and unsettling without announcing it. It also shows how much a very short poem can do with scale. A hen's squabble swells into naval warfare and then shrinks to bedtime, all in under forty words. It leaves us to enjoy the leaps and wonder what we have actually been served.