Six short lines, a cup of coffee and a bad-tempered bird: Dave Bonta's "Harried" gives us almost nothing to look at, and that is part of the trick. The speaker sits down to a morning ritual, but he isn't alone. A crow keeps him company, and the crow is in a foul mood. The central idea seems to be that even the smallest, quietest moment is crowded with other lives and other tempers, and that the speaker may be closer to the harassed owl than he first lets on.
Start with the opening line, "I take my portion of nothing". Because of the line break, it can be read two ways. Before the next line arrives, the speaker seems to be taking a portion of *nothing*, a share of emptiness, as if the morning were a meal made of silence. Then "more than coffee" lands, and the sentence rights itself: he takes nothing more than coffee. The slip is brief, but it sets a tone. The speaker is modest and a little wry, and he turns an ordinary cup into something faintly ceremonial with the word "portion", which sounds like a ration, an offering or a share at a table.
The table is shared with "the severest crow". The superlative is funny. "Severest" makes the crow sound like a stern schoolmaster or a strict preacher, someone who disapproves of everything. The word "with" matters too: the speaker takes his coffee *with* the crow, as though they were two companions at breakfast, one of them unwelcome but impossible to ignore.
The second stanza lets us hear what the crow is up to. He is "giving ill language / to some other owl". The phrase "ill language" is old-fashioned and slightly formal. It makes the caws sound like swearing, but swearing described by someone too polite to repeat it. Crows are known to mob owls, so the scene is believable as nature. The title "Harried" fits it well: the owl is being hounded, pestered and nagged. The poem never says outright who is harried, and that openness is where the poem gets interesting.
Consider the phrase "some other owl". Other than what? There is no first owl in the poem, unless we count the speaker. Perhaps "other" simply means one of many owls the crow has bullied. But the word also nudges us to imagine that the speaker is an owl himself, or at least owl-like: up too early, bleary, clutching coffee, fond of quiet. The final line, "drowsy and vexed", then does double duty. Grammatically it describes the owl, but it describes the speaker's morning equally well. Anyone who has been woken, or kept from waking up gently, will recognize the mood. The sympathy between man and owl is never stated. It comes from that small, well-placed adjective pair.
The poem's construction is plain and effective. It is two tercets of free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short and uneven, which gives it the feel of a spoken remark or a note jotted down. The shortest line, "more than coffee", is also the one that turns the meaning around. Instead of rhyme, Bonta uses sound quietly. The long *o* sounds in "portion", "nothing", "more", "coffee" and "crow" run through the first stanza like a low hum, and the harsher *s* and *k* sounds in "severest" and "crow" give the crow a rasp. In the second stanza the soft, drawn-out vowels of "owl", "drowsy" and "vexed" slow the pace, as if the sleepy bird were dragging the poem toward a sigh.
What makes "Harried" worth reading is how much it does without raising its voice. It treats a crow's squabble as a small drama with a villain, a victim and a witness, and it does so with humor rather than solemnity. It also lets the reader decide who the witness really is: a detached observer with his coffee, or a fellow sufferer who knows exactly how the owl feels. A poem this short can't explain itself, so it leaves a little ambiguity in each line and trusts the reader to notice.