"Go and be hanged" is the kind of thing people say without thinking, a flick of irritation that is more habit than threat. Dave Bonta's six-line poem begins in that easy, shared voice and then spends its remaining lines dragging the phrase back toward its literal meaning. What starts as an idiom ends as an image of a dead body, and the poem's central idea sits in the gap between the two: we hand out violent words so casually that we forget what they once pointed at.
The list in the middle does much of the work. "To a clerk, to a schoolmaster, / to two cows in the wood, / to God, to children" is built on the repeated "to", which gives the lines a chant-like momentum. The things on the list have nothing in common except that someone might snap at them. Officials, animals, children and God all receive the same curse, and the sameness is the point. The cows are the funniest and strangest detail, because they are so specific. Who shouts at "two cows in the wood"? Putting God on the same level as a schoolmaster is both comic and faintly shocking. The little joke is that the curse is aimed at everything, so it means nothing.
The word "we" matters too. The poem doesn't accuse anyone from a distance. It folds the reader into the habit, which makes the ending harder to shrug off.
That ending arrives with a change of grammar. Everything before it is indefinite or plural: "a clerk", "two cows", "children". Then comes "the man", singular and definite, someone in particular. Bonta writes "the man / that hangs" rather than "who hangs", and the colder pronoun quietly turns him into an object. The present tense keeps him there, hanging now, not once. The verb also echoes the "hanged" of line one, and this is the moment the figure of speech stops being figurative. The title does similar double duty, since "Hanging" can name both the careless cursing and the thing cursed.
The sound of the poem supports this. There is no rhyme, and the free verse is loose, but the lines have a pattern. Counting syllables, they run 6, 8, 6, 8, 6, 7, a short-long alternation that gives the opening a light, almost nursery-rhyme lilt. The last line slips just out of that pattern and slows down. After "filthy", it is nearly all single-syllable words: "flesh shrunk to his bones". The stresses pile up, and the "f" and "sh" sounds hiss and crumble in the mouth. The whole poem is also one sentence, which holds off its full stop until the final word. The grammar, like the man, is left suspended.
"Filthy" is the most loaded word in the poem, and it is hard to pin down. It could be the narrator's disgust, or the contempt of the collective "we" carrying on past the point of death. Either way it is the only adjective, and it sounds like judgment rather than pity. Against it, "shrunk to his bones" suggests a body left a long time, and the name Shooter's Hill gives the scene a real place in a recognisably English landscape. The poem never says why he hangs, though the picture of a body left on display reads like a public punishment. That is an inference from the imagery, not something the text states. There is a grim contrast between the "wood" where the cows stand and the "hill" where the man hangs, with the living animals placed beside the dead human.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. There is no "I", no moral and no explanation, only a list that tightens until it hits something solid. By withholding comment, Bonta lets the structure make the argument: the ordinary phrase and the horrifying object are one sentence apart. The poem asks whether we mean what we say, and shows us what the words would look like if we did.